Political reputation can be very complicated within this ever-changing political landscape. No one has mastered it otherwise politicians would never have anything bad about them online. That doesn’t mean to say you can’t manage it. We can’t bury everything but we can bury enough so that any negative press is severely limited in its ability to affect you.
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is at the heart of the entire spectrum that is politics. Confirmation bias influences most of our thinking, whether you like it or not. We all like to hear what we believe, and once again, this influences our political beliefs.
We all like to believe that our thinking is rational, unbiased and we stick to facts, but research has proven over the years that our cognition isn’t as reliable as we want to believe.
Political Reputation – Confirmation Bias Influence
Confirmation bias in turn can cause us to pay less attention to information that does not support what we know. You may have noticed this across social media platforms or have even realised you have experienced this yourself.
Reputation within the political world is more about what the politicians say and talk about rather than their actions. It’s all to appeal to the voters and what they want to hear.
You may be asking yourself; ‘how does confirmation bias affect politics?’ You’d be surprised, if you’re a supporter of a particular party, you may remember information that you have been fed to support your favour within that party. Your conscience wants you to be supported by this information.
However, the switch is that if you come across information that may contradict your belief about the party, you will more than likely overlook or deny the information that has been presented to you, or you may even see the negative information as less significant than it actually is. You are more than likely to support your party’s candidate and watch networks that favour this particular party, as it reinforces your belief in them. This also means that you only follow social media accounts that are in favour of the party.
This is how the political landscape has changed.
The Power Of Confirmation Bias
To further prove the point, we have very little power on how it dramatically shapes our thoughts.
The question you may be wanting to ask is if people change political affiliations to switch their support from one party to another, and this is the case. Confirmation bias causes their different expectations of what is actually occurring, this is brought to attention within their thoughts.
It’s only at this stage that it becomes a constant search for this confirmation. Deciding to adopt a new way of thinking and beliefs to support this other party.
It sounds extremely complicated, but we can assure you it’s a simple process.
To simplify confirmation bias, it’s choosing information you want to support what you believe. It proves Political Reputation Management is one of the harder ways of SEO.
The Depths Of Political Reputation
It’s clear that if you’ve witnessed any type of huge election, you know that if you want your family tree traced throughout the office, then you are more than likely to vote for a politician from a descendant of another you liked.
As a candidate runs for office, there is no doubt many researchers will try to uncover everything possible to either put the candidate down, or significantly increase the candidate’s reputation by exaggeration. The internet has further helped this scheme and influenced political views much more.
Two great examples of this would be from the former presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama. Donald Trump’s comments that were caught on tape about women, and Barack Obama’s citizenship skeptics. Regardless if they get proven right or wrong, many will stay misguided to the truths and lies, choosing which they believe, which is once again, confirmation bias.
Small Becomes Big Within Political Reputation
Within the political reputation world, it is clear nothing is fair. Since a candidate is under a lot of pressure from the media and faces intense criticism, things that appear to be only minor will be perceived as big issues and could face intense backlash.
Things like Michelle Obama’s arms go trending, or even Donald Trump’s small hands will be talked about a significant amount.
You’d be surprised to hear that there are people whose full-time jobs are solely to research a political candidate’s background to find anything that can make them look bad. Big or small, it doesn’t matter, if it’s negative it will be exaggerated, giving the public a subject to talk about.
Political Reputation Is Sacred
Another thing you’d be surprised by is the incredibly fast downfall a politician may have, especially during election time. Many will search to find any dirt they can on a politician and spread it on search engines and social media pages.
You have to remember that timing is everything and many will hire and pay to release information upon the opposing political candidate.
Once this information has been released at the correct time, it will spread like wildfire with many shares and re-posts. Not a day will go by without the opposing candidate receiving comments about this particular issue.
Furthermore, the algorithms implemented by search engines and social media pages will especially share information regarding political issues, especially if it’s near election time with that being a hot topic.
The reputation of political figures will depend on the social media outlets of reporting the story compared to SEO. While SEO typically has a good stance in political reputation, more people are more likely to engage with the stories they see at the top of search results.
Political Reputation Relates To Emotion
A pattern you may have noticed upon SEO and social media is that the most impactful and shared news has everything to do with sparking emotional reactions. Because of this, political agencies make many efforts to spark emotion within their readers, so that they feel like they should share the post further, which will draw more attention to it.
According to an in-depth scaled research report by Smithsonian, rage is the emotion that spirals the fastest. This action typically causes a chain reaction, and you may know the feeling if you have shared something that has angered you, it makes you very passionate about the story.
Feelings of being dominant are many strong features that appear around politics. This is a key feature within political reputation.
The Timing
You are well aware now that political reputation is an incredibly fast changing landscape and doing it correctly, let alone effectively, takes a lot of thorough preparation. Political news may seem that it has a lot of chance involved, but you’d be surprised with the amount of in-depth research and press releases that are prepared behind the scenes, they are just very carefully timed.
As an Online Reputation Management firm, we are very familiar with political reputation management and have seen this type of management take many different directions.
Even though the preparation of political reputation management can take at least 3 months, a number of factors like timing contribute. If this successfully affects the political opponent and he fails to respond successfully or didn’t respond within the correct time frame, they can make it much worse for themselves.
Political Reputation Management can vary, sometimes it will happen quickly, sometimes it will be prolonged across many months just to have a remarkable impact.
Meeting The Correct Audience
Political reputation requires sources with facts involved, i.e a bibliography. Because this is the case, you’ll find that news outlets tend to favour certain sources. To help, here is a graph of the top news outlets and where they favour within the political spectrum;
No matter what your political side may be, you may have noticed yourself to become affected emotionally by looking at your favourite news network being in the ‘wrong place’.
This falls in line with confirmation bias as again, people will conform to their beliefs. It’s also similar to those who tune in for Ben Shapiro most likely did not vote for Joe Biden.
Political reputation solely shapes around these publications so they match your outfit.
Spreading Through Social Media
The scary factor is that most young people get their news sources from a social media network, is your most recent source of news from social media?
A study was done by Ofcom in 2019 to find how popular social media is amongst people around the United Kingdom. Whilst TV remains strong, it is losing its footing whilst social media slowly climbs up. The problems lie at the bottom left as you can see 37% find social media reliable.
Source:
- https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/features-and-news/half-of-people-get-news-from-social-media