Exploring Digital Political Labour : political public relations and the exploitation of social media engagement

• This paper posits the notion of digital political labour (DPL) as a rewarding concept for the analysis of political public relations and social media. Numerous studies conclude that the engagement, dialogic and social affordances of social media have not yet been realized. But despite the lack of direct interaction, active audiences are, by their own actions in social media, taking part in DPL since audiences do not only receive political messages but contribute significantly with their own user-generated content. This empirical data in this study is from the official Facebook pages of Swedish political parties during the 2014 national election campaign. The results show that most of the communications work is actually performed by the audiences, and not by the parties themselves. This study highlight two important dimensions of DPL where users constitute targets and carriers of advertising as well as audiences whose free labour generates political campaign content.

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