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In 2016 there was the election of Donald Trump to the White House and the Brexit referendum which indicated a strong correlation between tweets and election results, but that research said more. He said: it is not by chance, with social networks electoral campaigns are won. In reality, the opposite also happened: through social networks it was clear who would win an electoral campaign. Since 2013, the year of the M5 exploit, in Italy we have not predicted the winners in newspapers or through polls, but by following the Twitter timeline. To say it all, it was not very clear what was the cause and what the effect and to what extent: that is, if tweeting a lot brought votes, or if the conversations on Twitter were indicative of the opinions of the voters. But this existed, it worked for seven years and many electoral rounds. Until last Monday.
The break must not have been accidental because, based on KPI6 data, was replicated in the regional. Among the candidates, only in Liguria the candidate who tweeted the most (Toti, 430 tweets in a month) won. For example, Giani, who surprised everyone with his comeback in Tuscany, made just 20 tweets in the same period against 101 of his rival Lega. The thing becomes even more interesting if we look at the five political leaders who have spent a lot on the electoral campaign. For them, KPI6 has built a Twitter Impact, an index that takes into account the number of tweets, retweets, likes and votes obtained by the respective party. In short, this is where we really measure how things were and we see that Twitter did not work either as a bearer or as an indicator of votes. Let’s take Salvini: 1,230 tweets, over 40 a day, an average of Trump: Twitter Impact, 722. Last place. Moving up in the rankings we find Renzi: 80 tweets, with an “impact” of 2832. Then Meloni, 114 tweets, “impact” 6430; Di Maio, 31 tweets, one a day, “impact” 17659; in the first place Zingaretti, 58 tweets, less than two a day, “impact” more than 20 thousand.
These are only the data of the elections of September 20 and 21, 2020, they could be an exception, from the next electoral round everything could go back to being as before. Or not. Or Twitter has become a bubble, like the historic centers of big cities that always vote differently than the suburbs, the famous ZTL factor. Or maybe we are growing and after a few years we have started to immunize ourselves from carpet campaigns on social media. We are no longer seduced by those who tweet the most, but by those who have something to say. If so, it would explain why the first party at this time is run by a secretary who has the same facility on social media as I do when I dance the Nutcracker on point. And that in the United States on November 3, a man who receives help from his granddaughter to use the smartphone could become president. It is not a return to the past, perhaps it is a step forward.
