A friend posted on her FB timeline – “so proud of my facebook newsfeed; it’s full of beautiful people posting pretty, pink things”. Another posted – “You have my VOTE!” on top of a picture of Bong Bong Marcos. Still, another, posted – “I have done my research. In 2022, I will be voting for Isko Moreno/Domagoso for president.”.
From here on in, their FB Timelines will almost exclusively be showing posts that will be supportive of their respective choices. They will look for FB groups supportive of their choices, they will be invited to join FB groups supportive of their choices and they will likely unfriend those who promote other choices. Facebook’s algorithms will pick up on these and will similarly direct content to their Timelines supportive of their choices. What comes out will be a perfectly curated Facebook experience that only mirrors their preferences. Over time, this perfectly curated FB experience generates a stress-free utopia with nary a post with a contrarian view.
There will develop a confident feeling of impending victory fed by content including surveys that show only their choice winning and articles narrating stories of their candidate in the best possible light. Their remaining friends will constantly feed their giddy feeling with similarly supportive likes, hearts, shares of posts on their Timelines.
The day of reckoning comes, the counting begins, the results start trickling in. Of the three friends who posted those comments on their Timelines, only one will experience validation of everything their utopic experience has exposed them to. Or it may be none of them will. Whatever the case may be, the other jilted followers will start to think, “this can’t be”. As the results continue to come in with their preferences on the losing end, the false narrative that they have been fed for the past 7 months will lead to the inevitable “dinaya kami“.
Herd mentality, group-think, survivorship bias, or whatever other cultural or psychological phenomenon contributed to this utopia, have all been previously documented. Ito ang ginagawa sa atin ng social media.
If you are serious about really making your candidate win, you will need to go beyond your comfort zones. You will have to engage and convince those who do not share your choice and convince them to join you. It doesn’t do anything to your candidate if you, as they say, only preach to the choir. They will already vote for your candidate.
No matter what some of these surveys say, each candidate for the Presidency will likely start out with no more than 10% of registered voters who have already decided on whom they will vote for. My guess is that only 30% of total registered voters are committed to those who have filed their candidacies. There remains the 70% that need to be convinced one way or another.
It will likely take at least 35% of the total votes cast to win. Only 80% of registered voters will turn out. That means a total of 50 million votes up for grabs. Your candidate needs at least 17.5 million of those votes to win. Your candidate probably has between 2.5 million to 5 million committed votes as of the moment. So your candidate needs at least 12.5 million to 15 million more votes to win.
We can quibble about the numbers but the point is that your candidate will not win by you cocooning yourself in your self-created utopia. As another friend said – “…more than unfollowing and unfriending people who unfortunately believe that Duterte and his enablers (BBM, Isko, Pacquiao, Lacson) are what this country needs, each of us will need to reach out, discuss, convince, persuade – in other words – campaign”.
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