Facebook and Odnoklassniki are the social media platforms that are most often used by electoral competitors, with over 80% of these having a page or a group there. Another two platforms, Youtube and Instagram, are periodically used by about 60-80% of the runners in the parliamentary elections of February 24, shows a monitoring report compiled by the Youth Development for Innovation. The foundation examined ten parties that were registered or announced their intention to run. The monitored period was December 26 – January 10.
In a news conference at IPN, project coordinator Igor Ciurea said this is the first report and it focuses on the pre-electoral activities of political parties. It aimed to identify the main online promotion channels. The report also centered on the analysis of the national electoral legislation on the online environment, international electoral standards and good practices in electoral promotion online. The foundation will present two more reports. The second report will be made public before the election day and will refer more to the content promoted online. The last monitoring report will be presented after the elections and will contain conclusions and recommendations.
One of the authors of the monitoring Mihai Mogîldea said there were chosen three websites that are popular with Moldovan users, taking into account the profile of each social media platform. These are facebook.com, instagram.com and ok.ru. There were also studied the Youtube accounts of the parties to see to what extent these distribute video content and determined the number of persons who follow the websites of the parties on the four studied platforms, the number of postings and the number of posting distributions.
The monitored parties include those registered before January 10, namely the Democratic Party of Moldova, the electoral bloc ACUM DA PAS, the Party of Communists, the Party of Socialists, the Shor Party and the People’s Movement “Antimafie”, and three parties that expressed their intention to run in the national constituency by that date, namely the Our Party, the Liberal Party and the Euro-Unionist Convention.
The monitoring showed that among the most active competitors on the four platforms were the Party “Action and Solidary” (Facebook), the Party of Socialists (Odnoklassniki), and the Democratic Party (Instagram). Also, the Democratic Party is on the same position as the Party “Action and Solidary” on Youtube.
Most of electoral competitors’ postings on pages or in groups on Facebook and Odnoklassniki consisted of a text – 93%. The postings that include photo or video elements represented 27.5% and 27.9% respectively. As to the content distributed on pages (Facebook) and in groups (Odnoklassniki) that belong to electoral contenders, the Shor Party is an authoritarian leader (4,040 distributions), being followed by the Party “Action and Solidary” (3,644 distributions).
The costs incurred by the election runners in the distribution of advertisements through electronic media are low. These prefer to mainly post electoral adverts on radio and TV, which are most often used by the potential voters to inform themselves about topical subjects, including elections.
Another author of the monitoring report Livia Țurcanu said that according to the financial reports submitted by the initiative groups to the Central Election Commission, only the bloc ACUM indicated electronic advertising costs of 4,000 lei. A more detailed analysis of the financial resource allocated for the purpose will be carried out later.
The monitoring report forms part of the project “Monitoring online electoral activity – Parliamentary elections 2019” that is implemented during October 2018 – March 2019 by the Youth Development for Innovation with the support of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.
