Political propaganda on Facebook

This week's readings for our course referred to the new media and politics. And just this Sunday, there was a referendum about the organization of student work here in Slovenia. The campaigns against and for the suggested reform were quite huge. But what seemed interesting to me, was the propaganda on Facebook. I confirmed my attendance on Facebook event, which was called something like “On Sunday I will vote against the small work”. I was following the debate on this Facebook page for some days and it became obvious to me, that there were two or three users, who constantly promoted the law about little work, presented their arguments (which were exactly the same as the government’s arguments) for acceptance of the law and sometimes they even directly assaulted people, who expressed their disagreement with them as stupid o naïve and out-dated. I became suspicious about their postings, because it looked like,they were on that Facebook page all day and answered to different post almost simultaneously as they were published. I decided to check their profiles, and I found out that they were probably fake. One of them didn’t even used a real name, but called himself Mavrični Bojevnik (Rainbow Warrior) and has joined only groups, which had something to do with politics, mostly pages about premier Pahor, governmental party SD or the mentioned law about little work.

Obviously, political parties are aware that with new media, new places for deliberation and political organization are emerging and are trying to influence them. I am pretty sure that they've payed someone to follow the debates about this new law on Facebook and try to discredit different beliefs and opinions. As results of the referendum showed, they didn’t succeed.