The how-to-guide covers a range of tools, resources and social media best practices to enable political candidates, campaigners, NGOs, social media managers, and citizens to engage more meaningfully in the lead up to the elections and beyond. It is the result of 4 years of experimenting with content creation, working within tech policy and learning from social media veterans. Highlights include:
- 100+ hyperlinks to online resources, tools, and additional reading material drawn from social media
companies and industry veterans. - Lists of must-have apps for content creation and free alternatives to expensive editing software.
- Overviews on building and leveraging online communities, establishing effective content creation
processes, and a number of other topics.
Click here to download the full guide.
Why did 11 million fewer women than men vote in Pakistan’s 2018 general elections? Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is a much higher gender gap in each province’s largest metropolitan city compared to its remaining constituencies. This gap relates to men’s views about women’s vote and women’s knowledge of politics and the electoral process. Poor knowledge is, in turn, associated with a low interest in politics, which links to the failure of political parties to directly engage women and address their issues. These challenges can be addressed with better targeted voter education campaigns and a concerted effort by political parties to engage women directly and reduce their perception of being ‘politically invisible’.
This paper seeks to determine the comparative opportunities and limitations of ‘new’ and ‘old’ data sources for early warning, crisis response, and violence research. The authors compare the information set produced through social media violence reporting with conventional violence reporting around the August and October 2017 Kenyan elections. Specifically, they leverage data from a sample of social media reports of violence through public posts to Twitter. These reports are compared with events coded from media and published sources coded by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) along three dimensions: (1) the geography of violence reporting; (2) the temporality of reporting; and (3) the targeting of reporting.