9 Concrete, Specific Things We Actually Know About How Social Media Shape Elections

How do social media actually shape elections? What does research say about how social media have affected elections in the past? When you take public discourse and run it through the Twitter spaghetti maker, how does it look?

Having looked at the literature, here are the nine things I think we can definitively say about how social media can shape elections, based on the way it already has done so, in elections around the world:

1. People and campaigns mostly use social media for dissemination, not dialogue.
2. Campaign websites remain the hub of US Presidential campaigns.
3. But non-major parties tend to converse more on Twitter. Especially pirates.
4. Elite journalists converse, too -- with each other.
5. But there's a potential for non-elite, anonymous users to succeed.
6. Discussion tends to happen around news events that are already being covered.
7. So what remains special about social media is that non-elite users control distribution.
8. Participating more in political discussion online doesn't necessarily increase political knowledge.
9. The huge effect social media have in elections, then, is that they allow non-elites to frame and distribute content made by elites. For better or for worse.