Twitter and the 2011 election campaign

So, for about the past 36 hours Canada has been in the midst of a federal election campaign. And aside from discussions of the willingness of various parties to enter coalitions with one another other, the topic that I have seen receive the most attention is Twitter use by politicians and staffers. Given the recent surge in the use of of this platform, and that this will be the first Canadian election to have all major party leaders with fully active accounts it seems not entirely surprising that there has been some discussion about the appropriate means of navigating this new landscape

Almost immediately a number of MPs and Cabinet ministers modified their Twitter names to reflect that they no longer MPs (though the Cabinet ministers still are Cabinet ministers). While a number of opposition types have changed their names, the accounts that seem the most important are those of Cabinet ministers, particularly those ministers who have been using their accounts to make policy announcements (in particular people like Tony Clement).

As I noted a few weeks ago, I think that this melding of public and private personas is potentially problematic and could lead to confusion about the status of certain statements. For instance, are we to now think that all of Tony Clement's old tweets are nothing more than partisan rhetoric (as they came from the account that he is now using and are still accessible through this account). Or are I am to somehow know that those old tweets were written by Tony Clement the Minister and these two tweets are being written by Tony Clement the candidate? And even if this distinction is clear currently, will it be so clear to someone who goes back through these tweets at some point in the future to follow political communications?

To some extent this confusion is already evident. Throughout the day CBC's Kady O'Malley has been tweeting about the fact that Harper's verified Twitter account had until Saturday been used as a non-partisan vehicle but has now started to carry partisan messages. After a quick check of old tweets it became clear that this account's first tweets were partisan messages in the run up to the 2008 election. Given the clearly partisan provenance of this account how are we to understand the content during non-election times? Does this account represent Stephen Harper the Prime Minister or Stephen Harper the Conservative Party of Canada leader? Given that the account has been used for both government policy announcements and partisan messages I think that it is fair to be somewhat confused.

I guess I am now hoping that one of the things this election accomplishes is the creation a slightly better understanding of how politicians should engage with social media applications and how we, as members of the public, are able to differentiate between the nature of the statements made by individuals with a variety of different roles and communications platforms. Whether this new understanding comes to fruition or not, I am sure that applications like Twitter will play more of a role than they have in past elections and that this role is only bound to increase as time passes.