Abstract

Despite the increasing interest on the impact of social media use for political campaign communication, it has been observed that the propaganda in the digital campaign processes, have been less well studied. This paper documents the role of social media in political campaign communication. This research is based on the review of past studies, conducted between November 2017 and April 2018 using Clarivate Analytics, Scopus database, Google and Google scholar. A total of 129 studies were identified and used in this study. Of the 129 papers reviewed, (n=75) 58.1% focused mainly on the use of social media (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) in political campaigns; the others (n=54) 41.9% focused on either the language of political campaigns, propaganda in e-electioneering campaigning, social bots and computational propaganda in electioneering campaigns as well as other related matters that shaped this review. A large proportion (n=33) of the studies reviewed that focused on social media (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) in electioneering campaigns predominantly used a questionnaire survey. In terms of country coverage, results from the reviewed papers show a focus on the US, Finnish, UK, Norway, Poland, Dutch, South Africa, Nigeria, Germany, India, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Indonesia, with only a few studies on Africa and Asia. Overall, results suggest that across the world, social media is now being used as a platform for broadcasting political opinions as well as a means of involvement and influencing of electorates to like a particular political party and to vote for a particular candidate. However, computational propaganda is now a threat to online political campaign and democracy across the world, because it can be used to fake grassroots political support and likes on Facebook and Twitter, thereby increasing the chances of manipulating public opinion and spreading political misinformation.