Last Monday we saw the upheaval of yet again another Australian Prime Minister. While watching the live feed on ABC with friends, I noticed a pattern amongst off camera news reporters. They were all busy typing on their phones. The funny thing is I turned to talk to my friends and they were all doing the same thing too.
From someone who doesn’t comment online regarding political topics, I was wondering why all of my friends mobile phones continuously vibrating. You see I learnt that Social Media is now the method of communicating opinions when it comes to politics.
On further investigation I realised the importance on social media leading up to and during Monday’s Liberal Spill. The momentum that was created by Malcolm Turnbull (who runs his own Social Media) was one of the key factors in his successful bid to overthrow Tony Abbott.
Let’s be honest Mr Turnbull’s previous position as the Minister of Communications and Broadband may have given him a slight online advantage in managing his social media accounts. While in contrast Tony Abbott viewed social media as “Electronic Graffiti.” and believed “ That in the media, you make a big mistake to pay to much attention to social media.” Was his disapproval of Social Media his downfall?
For months the Australian public have been vocal on their disatisfaction of Mr Abbott. If he had paid a bit more attention to social media, he may have see the spill coming. It’s interesting as during Tony Abbott’s term he spent $ 4.3 million in setting up a team to monitor social media political commentary.
In comparison Malcolm Turnbull’s full acceptance of using Social Media saw his 200k strong Twitter followers receiving tweets on Monday afternoon regarding his leadership challenge. His posts included policy implementation and also a link to his transcript of his Doorstep interview, where he announced his leadership challenge. The Australian people engaged with Mr Turnbull’s tweets by using the hashtags returnbull and Libspill. Twitter reported that #libspill was used 56 000 time between the 14th and 15th of September.
If Tony Abbott tapped into this market, could he have had a larger audience reach? Could he still be the Prime Minister.? Who's to know? Though later the defeated Mr Abbott admitted that the popularity of social media had affected the outcome of Monday’s spill.
The importance of social media and it’s affect on being able to make national change is indisputable. The question is when will this media platform stop being seen as the Wikipedia of the world and begin to be seen as a serious method of gauging real time public opinion. With another federal election taking place in late 2016 or early 2017, it’s safe to say that the tweets and posts will highly influence who the winner will be.
