Who is winning the AL-BNP battle on Facebook?

On new year's eve, highly skilled social media managers of Awami League and BNP on Facebook flooded the platform with hourly content – as always. 

All the party pages ahead of the national elections – which the BNP and other opposition parties are boycotting – have long been one of the major bases for the political parties to campaign their causes. The opposition relies on social media in particular as they don't enjoy mainstream media coverage like the ruling Awami League. 

Unlike the West where politicians tend to depend on advertisement, in Bangladesh, mass engagement on social media is more organic, as numerous official pages, as well as disguised ones, carry out the job in a coordinated manner and directly engage the users. 

A recent study titled "How Facebook has become a political battleground in Bangladesh" published on Tech Global Institute (TGI) sheds light on how the political parties – using distinctive strategies – reach out to millions of people through social media, which has over 44 million monthly users in Bangladesh.  

They investigated the behaviours of over 600 partisan Facebook pages and groups which are likely affiliated with the Awami League and BNP. They gathered around 500,000 posts with over 14.4 million followers and 97.5 million engagements. 

The study focused on their "interconnected networks, tactics used to distribute messages, and the differential approach in establishing their political agenda." 

So how are the partisan pages on social media doing in Bangladesh?

Let's have a look at some of their findings during the timeframe of the study - from 1 December 2022 to 30 November 2023. 

The Facebook page titled Bangladesh Awami League (with around 3.4 million followers) and Bangladesh Awami Jubo League (with around 262k followers) shared 9,385 and 9,364 posts during this timeframe. They had 6,60,5267 and 1,16,7810 likes against their Facebook posts respectively. Some other fringe pages among the top 20 of the AL pages had both fewer posts and less than one lakh likes each. 

Now Bangladesh Nationalist Party – BNP (with 2.6 million followers) and BNP Media Cell (with 2.5 million followers) pages during this timeframe shared 7,410 and 19,663 posts. And they had some 47,688,592 and 28,580,350 likes respectively. While most of their fringe pages among the top 20 had over one lakh to a million likes. 

This level of engagement gives the BNP an upper hand on Facebook. But this is not the whole story. 

The study has also found that the activists of the ruling party are known to "possess sophisticated resources, which include support from influential public voices."

"In 2021, the party's official think-tank reportedly aimed to train 100,000 'cyber warriors.' In this election cycle, its campaign seeks to reach 20 million active Facebook users. The party's electoral campaigns often feature endorsements from prominent celebrities and public figures," the study report adds. 

When one AL content is shared, it reaches about 100 pages and groups in around three hours. And around 70% of their share happens within the first three hours. 

The study found that Awami League leverages "a more sophisticated network of Pages, Groups and Profiles that do not bear the party's name." It also adds that the "limitations around the safe access of privacy-preserving Facebook data make it a challenge to rigorously assess the expansive nature of Awami League's online presence." 

This, however, also shows that they are coordinated, which automatically increases the reach of their content. 

And BNP, on the other hand, is more distributed. 

When it comes to likes and engagements, they leap much ahead of the Awami League, which is illustrated in the number of posts they shared in comparison and the number of likes. 

This only shows how both camps are quite efficient in reaching out to the masses. 

When reached out to the TGI research team, they told The Business Standard that while Facebook is important for political parties to reach out to their constituents, it is important to note that "social media is a subset of a much larger campaign strategy which is predominantly offline." 

"Our analysis finds Bangladesh Awami League is more centrally organised, while BNP is more distributed," they said. 

However, they pointed out that pages and groups on Facebook don't always disclose if they are affiliated with a specific political party despite sharing hyper-partisan content.  

"Facebook also does not take additional transparency measures to label partisan actors when they share organic content. Therefore, it isn't always straightforward to fully assess the extent of each party's online reach," they added. 

Facebook did not respond to requests for a comment until the filing of this report.

So how is both BNP and AL reaching out to people so effectively without depending on advertisements? 

There appears to be no definitive formula to it, but there are some mediums of content which reach more people. Photos are most common for example. 

During the last electricity crisis, for example, we saw how top pages of the political parties were trolling each other with photo cards that quickly reached thousands of people.  

"Analysing the data, we find photos are more prevalent in the Awami League's Pages, accounting for 63.75% of the content shared, in comparison to 45.47% of the BNP's," the study mentions. 

Why do the BNP fall short in photo sharing than the AL? Because recorded videos and live videos have been the lifeline of the BNP's social media pages, because they believe their campaigns are not adequately covered in the media.  

Among all social media, Facebook is most popular in Bangladesh and hence the political parties' effort to win over the space is reasonable. 

However, when it comes to the democratic process or really winning over the political field, technology can expand, exacerbate or support what is going on, but it is hard to say if this has a make-or-break-it role.