Much has been said of the Commission on Election’s recent foray into establishing a rudimentary regulatory framework for the use of social media in the coming midterm elections. The woefully—and sometimes willfully—uninformed trumpet the fear that the Comelec’s social media “regulations” curtail freedom of expression. Whether or not arising from a genuine misunderstanding of what these regulations actually are, these apprehensions are unfounded.
The new Comelec rules on social- media use for elections, contained in Comelec Resolution 10488, in fact, seeks to monitor only two aspects of such use: the cost of content production, and the cost of content promotion.
Cost of content production relates to the expenses incurred by the candidate and the campaign in, well, producing content. As anyone with more than a glancing familiarity with social media ought to be able to tell you, the only way to really make an impact on social media is to release content that is likely to be shared from user to user. Some people call this virality, or the tendency of an image, video, or piece of information to be circulated rapidly and widely from one Internet user to another. If content is king, then a viral video is king of kings. In the past—back when uploading video was nowhere near as easy to do as it is now—videos that went viral were often those that captured real life shenanigans of real people. Today, a few short years after videos began to be routinely uploaded and shared on social-media platforms, virality is no longer confined to authentic, shot-from-the-hip, content. Virality can now, in fact, be synthetically manufactured, albeit at significant cost, with public relations professionals now typically including “viral videos” in their list of deliverables.
Up until this point, the cost of producing content for online use has gone largely unreported, allowing candidates to essentially circumvent the campaign spending limits imposed by election laws. By specifically requiring campaigns to report how much is being spent on the kind of highly produced and well-funded content that now forms the cornerstone for may political campaigns, the Comelec hopes to plug this particular leak.
Another gap in the reporting law involves the cost of online content promotion. Apart from monitoring traditional political advertisements online—essentially the online versions of print ads and television commercials—the Comelec is now going to monitor the cost of engaging in the practice of boosting.
On social media, the size of the audience exposed to the content you produce (political advertisements, for example) is determined by the number of “followers”—the accounts that are subscribed to your account—you have. “Boosting” involves paying the social-media platform to make your content available to people who are not even subscribed to your account. And there is a great deal of customization available here. An account that boosts its content is actually able to determine which categories of users (i.e., users aged 18 to 32, for example; or users who live in particular geographic areas, and so on) receive your unsolicited content. It is targeted advertising in its most cost-efficient form. And until the new regulations promulgated by the Comelec, the campaigns could have literally poured millions of pesos into this practice without ever reporting the expenditure on their Statements of Contributions and Expenditures. Needless to say, this ability all but renders the campaign spending limits illusory.
Cost of content production and cost of content promotion are the two main objects of the Comelec regulation; not how many times you post political messages, or express your political opinions, and certainly not what’s in the stuff you post online.
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