VANCOUVER — As both the teachers’ union and government enforced a media blackout during sustained bargaining this weekend, social media users on both sides of the issue fired barbed words at one another, hoping to weaken the other side’s defences.
But as battles go, it was a lopsided affair, with a torrent of barbed tweets and posts in support of teachers overwhelming a barely perceptible trickle of support for the government.
Social media has become the online extension of the picket line for teachers.
“The strike on the picket lines also becomes a strike online,” said Peter Chow-White, Simon Fraser University communications professor. “The people who are locked out or on strike. They’re protesting not only outside schools but also on social media.”
School psychologist Todd Kettner showed the power of social media in a letter he wrote about his workload in the aftermath of a fatal tragedy on Slocan Lake. The letter was shared online by thousands of people, which ultimately reversed his 10-per-cent pay cut for the lockout.
Kettner is one of many disgruntled school employees who have shared their stories on social media, resulting in the most sustained and dominant online engagement the B.C. Teachers’ Federation’s media relations officer Rich Overgaard has ever seen.
“This is unprecedented. It has been completely constant and sustained since the beginning of the rotating strikes,” Overgaard said.
“In particular, when the lockout was announced, there were hundreds, if not thousands of teachers who were already on Facebook and Twitter, who had been watching and listening, but the light turned on and they all started engaging in numbers that we’ve never seen.”
The BCTF has an active social media strategy and provides social media workshops for teachers regularly. The organization’s Twitter account has grown from 8,000 followers to more than 11,000 in the past two weeks, Overgaard said. “In 2011-2012, the majority of teachers were still very shy on social media for good reason. There are professional issues around social media,” Overgaard said. “The federation has invested a lot of time and energy in training teachers how to use social media as professionals and citizens.
“They’re now using it to share their own stories. In the case of Keppner, by the time mainstream media were really dialing into it and telling the story, it had already been shared about 3,000 times on Facebook.”
While he’s not sure that all of the action on social media has made a difference to the actual negotiations, he said it has definitely made a difference in public support.
It has also allowed the BCTF more ability to gather information from its members more quickly.
On the other hand, the growing numbers of teachers using social media makes keeping information confidential more challenging, Overgaard said. The BCTF tries to notify its members first about any bargaining updates before the media is told, but with more than 40,000 members the news often becomes public before everyone is informed.
“It’s important to contain information,” Overgaard said. “But people want to talk, they want to share information.”
Despite all that online chatter, Ministry of Education spokesman Ben Green said in an email that social media has no impact on bargaining.
“As for social media, the BCTF’s use of social media has no bearing on negotiations. A negotiated settlement is going to be reached at the table, not through Twitter chats or Facebook posts,” Green said.
Social media gives teachers a format to talk together outside of their usual context, said David Tindall, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Sociology.
“It’s a little bit of a ritual in this context for teachers to energize them and reinforce their views,” Tindall said. “In most social movements the extent to which things get in the media is kind of thought to be a bit of a scorecard, so there’s certainly a motivation there to be as visible as possible.”
But it could be less about swaying public opinion than it is about performing a symbolic activity.
“Union leaders and those types of folks would probably have lots of followers, but the average teacher probably wouldn’t have that many,” he said. “So it would be perhaps more of a symbolic thing for the average teacher.”
Chow-White said there is a lot of support on social media for the teachers.
“The most popular retweets, the top tweets seem to be on the side of the teachers,” Chow-White said, commenting on a social media analysis Sysomos carried out as teachers embarked on their rotating strikes.
“Hey BC Teachers and Government. You want our kids to grow up. We have the same expectations of you,” read a typical tweet, in this case penned bynote auth="Matthew Robinson" coll="1" ctime="1cf7939 60226f80" mtime="1cf7939 60226f80"> Dale Regehr.
Social analytics websites like Topsy can be useful tools to gauge public sentiment on an issue depending on the key terms that are used. Topsy assesses the words for their positive or negative connotation then produces an overall “sentiment score” for a given search. The higher the score, the more positive the sentiment.
At first glance, Topsy logs fairly low sentiment in relation to the strike. Depending on the search terms, sentiment ranges from around 20 to 60, suggesting that many people are negative about it. But a closer look at the tweets themselves reveals that the comments in support of teachers tend to be so negative towards the B.C. government that the sentiment score ceases to be a useful measure.
“I support BC’s teachers. It’s abhorrent how little regardnote>Despite the online chatter, Chow-White said the mainstream media is the leading source of news in the teachers’ dispute with the government.
“The mainstream media will play a much stronger role in communicating this event and representing it than social media,” he said. “The mainstream media will set the agenda.
Chow-White said while Twitter is a go-to source for learning news, it is the links there to mainstream media where people still tend to go to gather their news.
“When I say I go to Twitter first, I can see a number of different voices and that also includes the mainstream media,” he said. “If it comes to who do I trust, or who do I see as being more valid, better vetted, I’ll take a mainstream news source over a blog unless I know the blog very well.”
Despite the active engagement by BCTF and its members, Chow-White said labour organizations haven’t adopted social media to the same extent other organizations or industries have.
“I would suspect among some teachers you would you see lower social media use that you would expect,” he said. “I think part of that is that this is a labour dispute and labour itself is one of those institutions that hasn’t grabbed onto social media like some other industries.”
Chow-White said while younger teachers may be using social networks like Twitter and Instagram daily, for older teachers “it’s not really part of the daily communication they use.”
