Social media is a complicated beast. On the one hand it’s tedious and shouty, enervating those who use it until we shrivel to a husk. On the other hand, it’s a powerful vehicle of political power for those who traditionally haven’t had much.
If you had a reform agenda, traditionally the preferred vehicles of change were strikes, turning out on the streets, letter writing or leaflet campaigns, or gingerly approaching voters at voting stations. If you weren’t part of a powerful union or business consortium with a six- to seven-figure advertising war chest, influencing the politics of the day was negligible.
But today a very modestly funded campaign can see groups put their reform agenda on to the local, state or national agenda.
Let’s consider people with disability as a group and measure their potential power to influence policy at the next election in Australia, the NSW poll on March 25.
There are 11 seats in NSW held by a margin of 5% or less (from 2465 in Willoughby to 429 in East Hills). The average NSW electorate has 55,000 voters, with one in six people living with a disability, meaning there’s an average of 9166 people with a disability in each one. While not all of them will be of voting age, and some will not be registered, we also need to factor in families of people with a disability for whom this is not a marginal issue.
While basic maths suggests people with disability are just another electoral minority, electoral maths suggests they are potentially a major political force.
Minority status does not matter in the exercise of political power if you are organised and cohered around an agenda. You don’t need to win 50%+1 of the voting population to your cause, you may only have to shift — or threaten to shift — a few hundred votes in a few critical seats to have a major impact.
The political arithmetic here is that an organised campaign and cohered social cohort can cause significant political damage if it campaigns against a negative reform, or wins significant change and commitments from major parties by campaigning for positive reform.
We could apply the same calculations to other cohorts and issues such as mental health, or a subset of that — say, women’s mental health. One in five people will experience a serious mental health issue, and 46% of young women experienced a serious mental health condition during the pandemic. Those are big numbers electorally.
So if the issue is important and impactful, has the capacity to find supporters, and you think you could swing 100,000, 5000 or even 1000 votes, you’re in with a good chance to influence policy and funding decisions by targeting 10, two or even one seat.
That’s the electoral maths, but what about organisation and the media and technological tools?
It is becoming increasingly apparent to people and organisations that haven’t historically had access to the levers of power that they now have access to instruments of power brought to us by the technological revolution. But what are they? And why are they changing the political landscape?
First is the 24-hour news cycle and the explosion of traditional media outlets. Forty years ago, we had five television stations in Australia. Today the ABC has five of its own TV stations. There are dozens of terrestrial and digital television stations and shows, hundreds of radio stations, and endless print and online publications, and they all need content. What that means is you have abundant opportunities to popularise your message, win adherents, and bootstrap your way up from there.
Second, social media allows those who were once isolated to find other like-minded people, develop and amplify ideas, get involved in some way with a campaign, and spread their message locally, state-wide or nationally.
Third, web pages and micro-sites become organising hubs and repositories for campaign resources: from coming events, to controlling messaging, to broadening supporters, to research, to donate buttons, latest news and media coverage.
And fourth, we have the capacity on social media to create micro-, geo- and interest-targeted campaigns delivered to the audience we think our message will resonate with, and create specific content and ads to run in the state or nation’s most marginal seats.
For those with more modest ambitions — such as seeking funding to run an important program that changes people’s lives, or a micro reform — our flat media landscape offers a great opportunity for reform.
For people or policy areas that have been neglected or ignored, there’s never been a better time to win reforms.
