2021 Local Self-Government

Discrediting campaigning trends on Facebook from 2018 to 2021 elections

The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy has been monitoring ongoing social media campaigns since 2018 in the context of elections. This report presents the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the discrediting campaign of the last three general national elections - the 2018 presidential election, the 2020 parliamentary election and the 2021 municipal election campaigns - as a result of social media monitoring. Similar campaigns are mostly run on anonymous pages. The use of social media bounties by election subjects to share their political visions and establish communication with voters is invaluable in the light of the COVID-19 global pandemic that began in 2020, when almost the entire world is learning to live in strict isolation. As much as social media facilitated communication between the parties involved in the election, it also created a problem for authentic electoral information as well, because harmful, mostly anonymous, actors continued to abuse it.

 

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