When election time hits, our TVs and mailboxes are often saturated with political ads and snail mail fliers that promote candidates, parties and policies. But how would it feel to be bombarded with these political messages on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and online advertisements? Technically, they’re already out there – but the Maryland State Board of Elections wants them to be regulated under the same rules as offline political content. And this might mean seeing small disclaimers on official Tweets and sponsored Facebook status updates…at least those coming from Maryland, for now.
Representatives from Google and Facebook were part of the Maryland State Board of Elections meeting last week that saw the proposal of new legislation designed to regulate political messaging in social media in the same way that it is regulated in traditional media. By the end of the meeting, the basic rules for political social media were in place: any Facebook page, Twitter profile, Google ad, or blog post originating in Maryland that contains an official political message must clearly display the sponsor and the source of funding for the advertisement.
Several parties submitted opposition to the new rules. The Center for Competitive Politics claims that this rule is arbitrarily geographically specific. Interested political parties outside of Maryland could engage in political advertising online that is viewable by citizens within the state without having to abide by the rule. Thus, they claim, the rule unfairly restricts social media usage by political campaigns within Maryland. They also oppose the fact that detailed digital and paper records must be kept of even the most minuscule (read: 140-characters or fewer) political message.
This raises an interesting debate over the implementation of traditional regulations on new media, and how politics and cyberspace are intermingling. Firstly, by their very natures new media is digital; old media is not. Archiving digital media can prove to be quite difficult. We reported back in April that the Library of Congress would be archiving all Tweets (yes, all 50 million+ daily Tweets), and other efforts have been made to store digital communications through the LoC’s Digital Preservation department. However, archiving political Tweets may mean extra costs for individual political campaigns, which a small, grassroots campaign might not be able to afford. Twitter and Facebook have often been the go-to media for low budget political activism precisely because of their low cost and little regulation. If this Maryland regulation catches on, small grassroots campaigns might find themselves squeezed out of even online political campaigning by the bigger (richer) players.
On the other hand, clarity over which Tweets are sponsored and which Tweets are not might be beneficial to us netizens. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if GovBlogger was part of a campaign to re-elect? Or if DCGirl was an independent journalist? Twitter does offer a verification process to weed out fake accounts, but getting right down to the nitty-gritty individual messages themselves would be a refreshing amount of transparency if it revealed who receives money for their political Tweets and who does not.
A measure like this all comes down to logistics. Including disclaimers with officially sponsored political messages on social networks is one thing, but regulating digital media can be tricky. Once a rule like this is put into place, it could potentially lead to restrictions on what types of political messages can be broadcast, on what networks, and to what groups of people. Or, it could spread into other areas and, for instance, lead to greater transparency in corporate sponsorship of social media. How this regulation is implemented will set precedence for online political and other campaigning in the future, and help to give shape to that nebulous space between free and monitored speech that social media currently inhabits.
