Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1137604
24 OPINION WELL… let's not point the finger too directly. Facebook is but one of a number of social media sites – alongside Instagram, Whatsapp, Twitter, etc. – that can all be seen to have severely distorted the (lo- cal and international) political balance of power… and a host of other things beside. But it's the one I use myself, so I'll stick with what I know best. And I'll start with the most recent example, then work my way backwards. This week, Ivan Bartolo – the former PN election candi- date, not the present MP of the same name – addressed a press conference outside the Stamperija to announce that some 200 signatures had been collected to force a motion calling on PN leader Adrian Delia to resign. So far, so good. I don't know Bartolo personally, but he does strike me as a serious, no- nonsense sort of politician – of the kind we used to automati- cally associate with the PN, but which no longer seems to exist anywhere else within that party at all. Unlike so many other Nation- alist exponents these days, he at least seems to understand that there is a proper way of going about such matters. Got an announcement to make? Make it to the press. Don't limit it just to a Tweet or a Fa- cebook status update… which will inevitably get drowned out in the exponential, chaotic hubbub that is social media commentary today. But what happened next? Ivan Bartolo's sober announce- ment precipitated a flurry of excitement among that micro- scopic army of anti-Delia social media warriors – all 12 or so of them – who still seem to think that a Facebook 'update' or 'share' has some kind of power to instantly settle any issue or dispute in their own favour. So the comments (and 'likes') start rolling in. 'Finally'… 'This is what we've all been waiting for…' 'Bye-bye Delia…', etc. Erm… excuse me, but the announcement was merely that 200 signatures had been collected (in over a week, by the way). The vote itself has yet to be taken… and guess what? It will be taken by over 1,300 PN councillors. Mathematics has admittedly never been my forte, but I'm fairly certain that 200 does not constitute a majority of 1,300 (in fact, it works out at just over 15%.) Yet already, you can hear champagne corks popping all over Facebook… as if a battle that has yet to even be fought, has already been won. It is almost as though 'social media' has taken the place of the 'wishing well' in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. If a Facebook post somehow chimes in with the viewer's own private opinion or bias… it becomes an instant, incon- trovertible 'fact'. Where do these people get such absurd delusions from, I wonder? For starters, the visibility of any Facebook post is, a priori, limited only to the reach of the uploader's re- stricted circle of 'friends'. OK, that reach might be extended through 'shares'… and in theory, its radius of influence could stretch out exponentially in all directions. It's called 'going viral', and it tends to happen chiefly with things like Beyonce videos, or the latest public rants by Kanye West or Charlie Sheen. It would be futile to deny that such trivialities do tend to reach literally hundreds of mil- lions of people worldwide, in a very short time. But a Facebook announce- ment by an anti-Delia user with around 2,000 'friends'? About an imminent challenge to Adrian Delia's leadership of the PN? My guess is that the post would have been shared around 10 – 20 times in total, and ultimately seen by no more than 20,000 at the very most. Even then, this tells us noth- ing about how those 20,000 would have reacted upon see- ing it. To get at least a (very) rough idea of that, you also need to tot up all the 'likes'… and at the time of writing, the update on 'PN Mill-Gdid Rebbieh' has been 'liked' by 55 people, and 'shared' the grand total of four times. OK, enough about social media fantasies, and onto the underlying reality. Where the anti-Delia faction struggled to collect a paltry 200 signatures in over a week, the counter 'pro-Delia' petition attracted more than 1,000 signatures in less than 48 hours. And the number is still rising. Granted, not all those signa- tures are of party councillors. Some 800 of them are of paid- up PN 'tesserati': a category that does not actually have a vote in this particular contest. BUT – and boy, is it a big BUT – they do have a vote when it comes to what matters most: party leadership elec- tions. It was, in fact, the inclu- sion of the 'tesserati' (by Simon Busuttil's ill-fated reforms) that led directly to the election of Adrian Delia as PN leader in 2017. Where does that leave the mathematics in this particu- lar equation? By the look of things, the anti-Delia petition – having struggled to reach the entirely unimpressive thresh- old of 15% – has now run out of steam. The counter-petition, on the other hand, is steadily growing. Already, then, there is evi- dence that the Delia faction enjoys an unassailable lead ahead of this vote of confi- dence. More councillors have openly expressed themselves in Delia's favour than against; and the rest – i.e., those who haven't signed any petition at all – will surely be mindful that the present leader is infi- nitely more popular among the tesserati, than all his detractors combined. Those 800+ votes will have a direct bearing on this confi- dence vote. Anyone toying with the idea of contesting the party leadership after this, will know up front that the all-powerful party tesserati will never forgive them for having tried to overthrow their own choice of leader, through the party's own structures. To me, it looks a lot like 'game over' for the anti-Delia faction. All other things re- maining equal, Delia should cruise comfortably to vic- tory in this vote of confidence (though, for the important purpose of covering my own ass… things might still happen to overturn that projection). More significantly, to my mind, it illustrates that the anti-Delia faction simply did not do their homework on this one. They launched their petition without even bother- ing to first gauge the extent of their own support among the people who will be voting on their motion. And that's a bit like diving headlong into shark-infested waters, without so much as dipping your toe into the water first (for let's face it: losing a toe is infinitely preferable to getting yourself maltatoday | SUNDAY • 30 JUNE 2019 Raphael Vassallo Facebook killed the political star