Instant Twitter reporting on Lebanese election violations
Tweeting from every corner of Lebanon, election monitors reported instantly on incidents of intimidation, illegal campaigning and corruption during recent municipal elections
By Lena Odgaard
When Lebanon held its municipal elections in May this year, the local NGO, the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE) used Twitter to foster fairer elections through instant reporting on violations of basic election rules. Describing the benefits of using Twitter, Executive Director of LADE, Yara Nassar says:
“It’s strategically valuable and very user friendly for people who are already familiar with it. And for us as monitors it gives us verification of violations through pictures and reports instantly””
Instant reporting on violations
For the 32 municipality elections, LADE sent out 145 monitors to report on violations. The monitors found cases of illegal campaigning on the day of the election, intimidation of voters, voting outside voting booths, and lack of assistance for people with special needs.
Compared to previous elections, the violations were not new, says Yara Nassar, but this year, LADE received the information immediately, instead of having to wait for several days:
“We sent photos of violations the moment they occurred and this gave more credibility and enabled the LADE central team in Beirut to take action to solve the problems we reported on”, says Samia Makki, one of LADE’s monitors.
According to Samia Makki, the tweeting monitors’ main concern was the occasional lack of Internet access and a few cases where local election organisers prevented monitors from taking and sending photos. But since monitors would just send their reports as they moved on to other areas with better connection, it caused only a few hours delay, says Yara Nassar.
Inspired by bloggers
Journalist and social media expert, Assaad Thebian, was among a group of bloggers who proposed LADE to use Twitter for monitoring the elections. The idea was based on his own experiences from covering the 2009 elections.
“At that time we felt there was a need to explain to the public what was happening on the ground. And because we believed that elections are one of the great chances for civic engagement”, says Assaad Thebian.
Assaad Thebian explains that many mainstream media channels are controlled by political parties and as a consequence often biased. To remedy this, the bloggers set out to provide the Lebanese public more reliable reports of election violations and were able to gather several photos documenting distributions of ballots at the election sites and even a couple of videos showing people receiving money before going to cast their votes.
Involving citizens
To ensure reliable reports, LADE used only experienced monitors who had gone through training in election monitoring. For those who did not know how to use Twitter, LADE provided introduction courses.
The tweets were followed closely by leading national newspapers, An Nahar and Al Akhbar. Not only did they cover LADE’s reports but they also retweeted them to their 50.000 and 20.000 followers respectively.
Last year, the Arab Social Media Report, a report of social media usage in the Arab countries showed that Lebanon – a country of 4 million people – had around 80.000 active Twitter users. After the Arab uprisings, this number is expected to have grown significantly and Assaad Thebian believes social media will continue to be used as a platform for civic participation:
“We believe the monitors’ reports will not stop at boundaries of Twitter but will go into the public debate and have people talking about how they can use social media in order to foster a kind of civic engagement and civic journalism”, says Assaad Thebian.
And since LADE has already noticed civic engagement at the recent elections when also ordinary voters used Twitter to report violations, the organization is considering making an extra report collecting violations tweeted by citizens to let their voices be heard.
LADE is working on an app for smart phones, slated for launch as a pilot tool for violations monitoring at next year’s parliamentary election. So far the social media tools are still complimentary to more traditional methods, such as SMS-systems, but the organisation’s Executive Director Yara Nassar has high expectations for future viral reporting.
“In 2017 we hope we will be able to have all our monitoring done through Twitter”, she says proudly.
