Algorithmic Media Observatory

digital methods for internet policy and politics

Archives for October 2019

Trudeau loses meme war; Singh lone candidate with positive coverage

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Analyzing the top seven Facebook groups that seemed organic and not third-party advertisers, we found that meme groups mostly engaged in negative campaigning, fostering group affinities and trying to vote out Trudeau.

Over the 40-day campaign, these groups posted 580 memes or on average 14.5 memes per day. As seen in Figure 1, NDP and anti-Trudeau Facebook groups were the most active.

Figure 1 – Number of memes posted by group type

We found:

  1. No active meme groups were dedicated to promoting Trudeau, Scheer, or May.
  2. Anti-Trudeau meme groups encouraged followers to vote Conservative for Scheer, though not as much as criticizing Trudeau.
  3. Singh was the most popular candidate in memes with NDP-leaning meme groups engaging in positive campaigning around their leader and party.

TrudeauScheerSinghMayBlanchetBernier
Negative2128711111720
Neutral368479521566563558
Positive01347302

Figure 2 summarizes the table above. Tone has been coded by one coder at present, so inter-coder reliability is not available.

Figure 2 – Tone in memes

From our first-hand experiences of collecting memes, we noticed that:

  1. Misinformation about Trudeau, especially allegations of sexual misconduct, had a receptive audience in anti-Trudeau groups, a popular theme throughout the campaign.
  2. Styles differed by partisan groups with NDP and Liberal groups seeming the most adept in referencing Internet culture where Anti-Trudeau memes created their own ‘internet ugly’ images shared by supporters.

After the election, we will be analyzing the content and partisan styles of memes as well as further code memes by issue so please keep following for more analysis.

Don’t be the Joker that Votes for [INSERT PARTY HERE]: Strategic Voting and Political Memes

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With horse race coverage of the election fixed on a dead heat between the Liberal and Conservative parties, partisan Facebook memes now try to persuade voters on the best way to cast their ballot when it seems no party will win a majority. Though not officially affiliated with political parties and therefore independent, these groups largely align with the positions of the respective party they tend to support. Liberal memes remind voters that voting Liberal is the only way to defeat Conservatives. Similarly, Conservative Facebook pages warn voters about the risk of a coalition if the Conservative’s do not win a strong mandate, whereas NDP memes call on voters to vote with their beliefs, and use the looming outcome as a reminder for electoral reform.

Strategic Voting as Key Liberal Message

Voting NDP will not defeat the conservatives according to Liberal-leaning memes. These memes mock progressive voters for being naive about their vote and out of touch with the NDP’s election prospects. Dippers are presented as ‘confused’, as seen in Figure 1 that uses an old Filthy Frank image. Instead, the meme suggests voters need to be pragmatic and vote Liberal. 

Figure 1

Another Liberal meme uses a scene from the film Thor: Ragnarök to make a rather complex call to vote Liberal strategically. Figure 2 is a known meme referring to the film’s end when Thor realizes he cannot defeat his evil sister Hela, the film’s villain. Only by bringing about ragnarök — the destruction of Thor’s home Asgard — can Hela be defeated. Here, the evil Hela is labelled as the Conservative Party. She mocks a weary Thor, labelled as the NDP. The Liberals are labelled as the all-powerful demon Sutur, bringer of ragnarök. In the film, Suter defeats Hela while destroying Asgard. The meme casts the voters’ choice in no less dire terms: they have to choose the lesser of two evils. The NDP, heroic as it may be, is less powerful than the Liberals. Only the Liberals, the meme implies, have the power to defeat the Conservative threat.

Figure 2

The meme, importantly, does not include the final shots of Asgard on fire nor comments on the film’s deeper anti-colonial messages. We have not encountered any reaction memes to date that play on these missed references.

NDP: Don’t Fall for Calls to Vote Strategically

NDP-leaning memes frame strategic voting as a trick played by Liberals on progressives. Using many popular memes, they try to remind voters that voting Liberal does not ensure a progressive government. Instead, as seen in a play on the Flex Tape meme used in Figure 3, the Liberal record is the real problem. Voting strategically is just a ‘patch’. Figure 4 makes a similar point where Lucy’s age-old trick on Charlie Brown illustrates the plight of strategic, progressive voters.

Figure 3
Figure 4

NDP memes also emphasize that the party’s values are important enough to take a risk. A play on the popular Woman Yelling at a Cat meme (Figure 5) is a good example of how NDP voters push back at Liberal calls for strategic voting.

Figure 5

Anti-coalition Conservative Memes

Conservative memes trade in the old stock worry about a coalition, much like their leader Andrew Scheer. Posts from third-party advertisers Canada Proud and Proud to be Canadian, seen in Figures 6 and 7, have circulated in anti-Trudeau groups. According to these memes, voters should be worried about a Liberal-NDP coalition, much like Scheer’s fabricated comments about tax hikes, and so Figure 4 asks voters to “play it safe” and elect conservatives. 

Figure 6
Figure 7

More organic memes from groups with supposedly user-generated content also worry that a vote for the NDP is a trojan horse for the Liberal party, as seen in Figure 8.

Figure 8

From Memes to Mobilization

As the election campaign draws to a finish, meme groups have also begun to encourage supporters to get out the vote. These memes, seen in Figures 9 and 10, illustrate how online communication is part of election day mobilization. Sharing a meme is the first step in today’s online ladder of engagement. 

Figure 9
Figure 10

Lack of Platform and “Carbon Hypocrisy”: Climate Change Memes in the Canadian Federal Election

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Key Points

  • Climate change is a divisive issue in the Canadian meme space.
  • Conservative memes tend to dismiss current policy responses to climate change, or frame liberal campaigning practices as hypocritical.
  • Liberal memes point out conservative shortcomings in climate change policy without necessary championing Trudeau.
  • Only NDP-supporting memes tend to champion their own policies, positioning the party as the only one taking real action on the climate emergency. 
  • There continues to be a lack of Green memes. 

Analysis

Climate change and environmental policy has been a central issue in the campaign. After the Climate March on September 27, 2019, we wanted to know how meme groups capture the attention to the environment amongst partisans on Facebook.

Liberal memes

Liberal leaning memes tend to focus their point of critique mostly on Scheer’s or the Conservative Party’s complete lack of a climate change platform. Some memes reference former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government and frame voting for the conservative party as a step backward. Other memes present alleged climate change denial by the conservatives as part of a broader, allegedly discriminatory platform on social issues that includes the cutting of social services, for example. 

Memes tends to attack Scheer’s policy than to amplify Trudeau’s own attempts to make climate action memes. Trudeau’s tweet to plant 2 billion trees — an iteration of the “That’s It. That’s the Tweet” meme  — did not inspire any memes or positive reactions in our sample.

Conservative memes

Conservative-leaning memes tend to attack political opponents directly, pointing out hypocrisy or naivety. In these situations, conservative leaning memes mock people for changing consumer habits (like not using plastic straws) and highlight apparent contradictions, such as Justin Trudeau’s participation in the Climate March in Montreal.

Another popular attack is against the Liberal’s use of two campaign planes. In these memes, Justin Trudeau is accused of hypocrisy for travelling between political debates and rallies during the election campaign.

While not directly referencing climate change, several conservative-leaning memes represent the Trudeau government’s carbon tax as theft from taxpayers, or as a policy that allegedly shuts down conversation and dissenting voices by being presented as a matter of life or death.

Some memes go as far as to cast doubt on the existence of climate change, for example by making seemingly common-sense inferences about the connection between melting ice and rising sea levels.

Like others in the right-wing media system, some groups share more hostile memes, especially towards Greta Thunberg. These memes seek to undermine Greta’s role as a climate change activist by calling attention to her age and invisible disability (autism). In doing so, this content mocks, trivializes, and ridicules not only Greta but people with disabilities and climate change activists alike – especially young ones. 

Leftist Memes

Memes that are left-leaning or NDP-supporting take up both the alleged liberal hypocrisy regarding climate change and the conservative lack of a climate change platform and policy proposals. Here, Trudeau is attacked for the identified contradiction between portraying himself as a climate leader and counteracting his own promises, i.e. through buying the Trans Mountain Pipeline. The conservatives are criticised for their alleged ignorance and climate change denial. Both former conservative and the current liberal government are denounced for supporting the oil industry.

Conclusion

Singh, of all leaders, seems to benefit the most from climate change memes, suggesting that memes might be another part of his campaign’s perceived success on social media. Otherwise, memes reinforce the deep partisan divides over responses to the climate emergency. And the tone, especially amongst Liberal and Conservative leaning memes, remains hostile, with little evidence of common ground between partisans.

“I do not know how my email address ended up on their list” – Canadian complaints about election advertising

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Key findings:

  • 53% of analysed complaints by voters to Elections Canada in 2015 related to unsolicited contact by political parties without an opt-out possibility (139 out of a sample total of 264)
  • Other types of complaints ranked much lower: campaigning on election day (24%), misleading or false information (16%), and undisclosed affiliation (7%)
  • The vast majority of targeted campaign activities that voters complained about happened over the phone (43%), via email (29%) or through Facebook (17%)

Analysis

Digital advertising is an everyday practice for businesses, NGOs and political parties alike. It promises to reach specific audiences—potential customers, supporters or voters—more effectively, with targeted messages. But we know little about whether Canadians like targeted ads, especially in politics. Our research team looked at complaints that Canadians had submitted to Elections Canada for the 2015 Federal Election to learn about public attitudes to digital advertising by parties during elections.

These results supplement the little survey data we have about Canadians’ attitudes to digital advertising. Almost a third of Canadians (29%) have an ad blocker installed according to the 2018 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, suggesting that many try to opt-out of digital advertising. 

The reason may be because they worry about the privacy implications of digital advertising. 73% of respondents are concerned about potential privacy violations from using Facebook as reported by the 2019 Canada’s Internet Factbook. The same survey found that after learning that social media companies can store and share users’ personal information without their knowledge or consent, 43% of Canadians said they changed their privacy settings, while 32% took no action or reduced their use of social media. 

Many Canadians are also confused about how online advertising works, as we also find. About a third of respondents think their mobile device listens to them via the microphone without their permission. 

Complaints about targeting practices in Canadian Federal Elections 

Via two Access to Information Requests, we obtained 598 pages of complaints related to online advertising. We coded a total of 264 complaints by platform while developing criteria for the nature of the complaint. Analysing the data revealed interesting findings about why voters turned to Elections Canada to complain, and which platforms used for targeted advertising elicited negative responses from voters. 

Types of complaint


The vast majority of voters who complained to Elections Canada about campaign practices by political parties were concerned about the fact that the contact was unsolicited without giving them a possibility to opt out. In their perception, this was often compounded by the fact that they did not know how the party in question had obtained their contact information. 

“This morning, I received an unsolicited email allegedly from [name of candidate]  telling me the following: (…) I am very disturbed by this, primarily because at no time in my life, have I ever given my personal email address to [name of political party]. I have never voted for this party and have never supported them with email, other than when complaining to my MP. To me, this is unsolicited spam. Out of curiosity, I tested the links provided in the PS section, and in no case was I given the option to “UNSUBSCRIBE” from any further email. And so I am registering a complaint against [name of political party] for wasting my time and for invading my privacy.”

Complaint to Elections Canada, 2015

Many complainants were perturbed by the fact that political parties were still campaigning on election day. Often these complaints confused what was and was not election advertising—an indication that election advertising is not as clear cut in the minds of voters as it is before the law. In Figure 1, a voter complains about seeing a message posted on election day that seems like advertising. Elections Canada permits these posts on election day as they do not have a “placement cost” and thereby do not count as advertising.

Figure 1 – Alleged advertising on election day, 19 October 2015

A smaller number of voters were concerned about targeted advertisement that did not disclose party affiliation, especially where it concerned campaigning activities by third parties. Figure 2, for example, shows a third-party ad that appeared like a news story to one voter, suggesting ongoing confusion among voters about how to distinguish news from advertising online.

Figure 2 – Complaint that advertising appeared like news

Platforms complained about

Phone calls, including both live and recorded ones (“robocalls”), were named by most complainants as the platform that political parties were using to get in touch with them. Emails make up the second big chunk of complaints, followed by Facebook. 

Other social media channels, TV and Radio figured only marginally in the complaints. Many complainants want to know how political parties obtained their contact information, and enquire whether the targeting practice in question constitutes a violation of the law. 

“Although I understand candidates have to campaign it is a bit annoying and very intrusive when your evening is disrupted by numerous robocalls from one candidate. Absolutely ridiculous. This method of campaigning has to change. I’m sure they would not appreciate it if I called with a recording to their home 3 or more times in one night.” 

Complaint to Elections Canada, 2015

While we cannot assess Elections Canada’s overall response to these complaints, some complaints in our sample included a response from the independent institution clarifying the law to the complainant.  

Ambiguous attitudes toward targeted advertisement and use of personal data

These election complaints support what we know from other studies: targeted advertising is unpopular. Two recent studies from the US have pointed to ambiguities in public attitudes toward micro-targeting in elections and customer surveillance. In their 2013 survey study, Eitan D. Hersh and Brian F. Schaffner conclude that voters on average in fact do not support candidates who reach out to them with specific messages based on their (assumed) group identity. Contrary to the rationale behind targeting, voters seem to prefer ambiguous messages based on broad, general principles – and tend to penalize candidates who target them by mistake, hence cancelling out the positive returns of successful targeting. 

In the cases above, voters complained when they received ads from political parties they did not plan on voting for. We did not, however, see many complaints about the ads being too targeted, or knowing too much about voters.

On a more general level, Nora A. Draper and Joseph Turrow point out that many people would like to protect their privacy and limit companies’ (or, by extension, political parties’) use of their personal data, but often feel unable to do so. Obscure communication practices of corporations trying to protect their gains from consumer surveillance prevent individuals from making informed decisions about what happens to their data. This often means they don’t act at all, succumbing to “digital resignation” due to feelings of frustration, futility, and cynicism. 

Complaints about not being able to opt-out or questioning how they ‘got added to the list’ suggests that many people feel out of control regarding their communication preferences in a digital age. That Elections Canada has little to help the voters address their concerns suggests that these complaints will do little to quell this public frustration.

Thanks to Thomas Hackbarth and Margaret MacDonald for coding election complaints. Janna Frenzel wrote this post with Dr. Fenwick McKelvey.