Social media election campaigning: who is working for whom? A conceptual exploration of digital political labour

ABSTRACT

This paper posits the notion of digital political labour (DPL) as a rewarding concept for the analysis of political communication and social media. Numerous studies conclude that the engagement, dialogic and social affordances of social media have not yet been realised. But despite the lack of direct interaction, active audiences are, by their own actions in social media, taking part in DPL since audiences do not only receive political messages but contribute significantly with their own user-generated content. The empirical data in this study are from the official Facebook pages of Swedish political parties during the 2014 national election campaign. The results show that most of the communications work is actually performed by the audiences, and not by the parties themselves. This study highlight two important dimensions of DPL where users constitute targets and carriers of advertising as well as audiences whose free labour generates political campaign content.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• political communication
• election campaign
• content analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.