US President Barack Obama revolutionised political campaigning in 2007, when he took Change We Can Believe In to the social networking platform, Facebook.
In 2012, a year after the elections that saw the ruling party’s popularity plummet, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong joined Facebook. He has since accumulated some 440,000 Likes.
Last May, Narendra Modi defeated the Gandhi political dynasty to become the Prime Minister of India. Modi is the second most popular politician on Facebook. His opponent did not have an account.
Welcome to the age of Virtual Politics.
Facebook has become a stage for political campaigns and image-building. This project uses metadata from Obama, Modi and Lee’s Facebook pages to better understand this new phenomenon.