Too many social media storms end up just rattling around in an echo chamber

Reverse what the audience cheers on Q&A to find out what mainstream Australia really thinks. The same is true of social media.

Q&A and social media give an insight into how GetUp and the unions manufacture a crisis. Picture: Supplied/istock

I’ve been finetuning a theory that the best thing about the ABC’s flagship political debate program Q&A is that it provides an impeccable barometer of mainstream opinion in Australia.

The theory proved especially compelling in the lead-up to this year’s federal election.

Here’s how it works.

You watch a few minutes of the program, and when you see the audience cheering in mad delight at a political point a speaker has just made, you reverse it to find out what mainstream Australia act­ual­ly thinks about the issue. The same is true of social media, princip­ally Twitter, which is the preferred medium of the politically engaged, and skews massively to the left of centre.

In the wake of this year’s elect­ion result — which came as no surprise to those of us who work in “old” but enduring media forms such as commercial talkback radio, affording us real-time feedback from normal people on issues such as franking credits, tax relief and negative gearing — Twitter was awash with shattered souls who were forming spontaneous support groups in disbelief that the Australian voters had got things so terribly wrong.

The reason this result was so unexpected was that the people who do all their talking on Twitter are too busy to talk to anyone else.

They didn’t expect the conservatives to win, because they never talk to anyone who imagined or hoped that the conservatives would win.

The reliance on social media as a gauge of public opinion presents challenges and pitfalls for the mainstream media. The extent to which social media can be used by groups such as GetUp and the union movement to create a perception of crisis or collapse for their opponents means mainstream journalists can be suckered into following news leads that do not exist. This is particularly true of those news organisations that have a natural sympathy towards those groups on the left, at outlets such as The Guardian or in some quarter­s at the ABC, whose giddy reporting on certain issues and individ­uals during this year’s elect­ion now seems laughable.

But even neutral or conservative news outlets can get snowed by an issue that is presented on ­social media as an unstoppable groundswell. In the modern journ­alistic space, it is harder to find a lazier­ or more unreliable news construct than the phrase “a social media storm has erupted”. Working out the true extent of these “storms” is easier said than done.

Indeed, what is often presented as the political equivalent of Hurricane­ Barry, which recently­ steamed up the Gulf Coast from the Caribbean towards New Orleans, is in reality little more than a few like-minded drips typing away furiously on Twitter, in passionate agreement with one another.

The impact of this phenomenon is twofold. It is bad for journ­alism, if journalists and news organisations are gullible enough to be swayed by it. But, counter­intuitively, it is terrific for the conservativ­e side of politics, as it has the effect of herding all of its opponents into what is effectively an echo chamber, where they are disconnected from the type of mainstream sentiments you can find in front bars, at shopping malls, on talkback radio, or any field of normal life that doesn’t come with the #auspol hashtag.

The conduct of GetUp in the recent year’s election is under scrutiny, with besieged SA Liberal backbencher Nicolle Flint giving a powerful account this week of the extent to which that organisation tried to destroy her in the marginal seat of Boothby at this year’s poll.

I spent an hour in Flint’s Adelaide electoral office on Wednesday, where she has amassed the full extent of the social media campaign­ that GetUp and the union movement ran against her in that seat. She has several fat ring binders filled with Facebook and Instagram posts, memes and attack ads that were circulated not just by GetUp but via the social media accounts­ of the Australian Education Union, the Constuction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union, the Nurses and Midwifery Association. The posts attack Flint over everything from her support for Peter Dutton in last year’s leadership push against then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, to her apparent sceptic­ism over climate change and ­support for a tough border protection regime.

Many of the posts appear to be simple fabrications about her allege­d support for cutting funding to local schools and hospitals, putting dubious dollar figures on issues­ with which she had no involvement as a local MP. The sum total of this social media noise was it helped GetUp create a strong perception in South Australia that Flint was going to lose her seat.

This elevated the attention the mainstream media placed on the electorate, even though it has only been held by Labor once in its entire­ history, way back after the end of World War II. “There is no doubt the mainstream media have become the enablers of groups like GetUp” Flint told me last week. “Even if they unwittingly follow stories that have emanated on social­ media, they end up doing GetUp’s work for them by believing that certain issues are resonating when they aren’t.”

Flint told me that she had a few calls from unhappy voters about her support for Peter Dutton, althoug­h she believes most of them were from people who were already committed Labor voters, rather than disaffected Liberal moderates or swinging voters.

She did, however, have hund­reds of calls from voters, as well as casual comments when she was trawling for votes at the local mall, from people saying they were alarmed and angry at the abusive personal tactics that were being aimed at their local member via GetUp and Labor attack ads.

And she also had many hundreds of comments and questions about the impact of Bill Shorten’s proposed franking credits policy, in a seat with the oldest age profile in Australia and one of the highest proportions of retirees in the land.

Despite all these factors, Flint’s battle to hold Boothby was often presented by the mainstream media as the uphill battle by a far-right, Dutton-loving, climate-change-denying neocon to hold on to her seat, despite a groundswell of opposition that could be evidenced by the flak she was copping­ on social media.

Her election result shows that the “evidence” of that groundswell was not evidence at all.

It was the manufactured product­ of a self-contained echo chamber, being used by GetUp and the unions to create a perception of crisis. It was only when the votes were tallied up that the real story could actually be told.

Chris Mitchell is on leave