The SGA Election Commission needs to be careful

To paraphrase Milo Yiannopoulos on his visit to the University of Houston, whenever you tell 17 year olds (or in this case, 18-24 year olds) not to say something, they will find it to be the funniest thing ever by making fun of it.

Though we say it all the time, the world has truly and unequivocally changed with a Trump presidency.

This past election saw the rise of places like r/The Donald, who, by its own admission, helped to “meme Trump to the presidency.” What was learned? People really like to troll online, especially when it comes to politicians.

So as a new SGA election season begins, the University enters new territory that it has not yet experienced. Were there memes during the last election? Sure there were. The HYPE Party’s primary endorsement form came as a quick dab. Memes have always existed, but there wasn’t an overt reliance on memes like we saw in the presidential election.

This all means that the Election Commission needs to be extremely careful on how they approach this election and what they say. People are looking for reasons to troll; they’re looking for reasons to go after something — a pseudo-cause.

This past Monday, there was a rumor going around that any candidate using or advocating the hashtags #ShameShane and #ShameWinni could have a complaint filed against them for “psychological attacks.”

“One could hardly claim that criticizing an individual’s character or ethics as it relates to the election particularly traumatizing, threatening, or humiliating,” said Austin Turman, the Chief Election Commissioner.

This is easily the right way to address this situation. 

Now, I’m not advocating for attacks. I think I speak for everyone when I say that I want a clean campaign between all parties. But if the fact that these rumors are being started — true or not — just speaks to the nature of the internet politics.

This isn’t inherently bad, seeing as anything devoid of some type of humor is taking itself too seriously (no one should ever take themselves too seriously). Take, for example, the fact someone created REDvolution’s Dank Meme Stash.

This is an obvious play on Gary Johnson/Bernie Sander’s Dank Meme Stash — popular Facebook groups focused primarily on posting memes in support of its candidate.

REDvolution is not the party embracing memes. The formally registered Vote for Meme party utilizes humor to engage students in its campaign.

This is fun. This is people not taking politics too seriously, especially Student Government Association politics.

But then there’s the example of the Spirit RED incident. Within a few hours of the campaign going live, the party took off the ability for a Facebook user to review the party due to many negative reviews. Whether valid criticism or not (again, I’ll let you make that call), the party had a 2.8 rating pretty quickly after the first review. There was an avalanche.

This is the new political internet reality.

Spirit RED commented, explaining, “the reason why we disabled comments is because a certain group that has been targeting SGA all year has used the ratings as a platform to launch an attack based off of something that has no relevance to the platform.” This is a basic explanation on how the relationship between politicians and their relationship with people has changed.

Now the Joker in all of us has a little bit of fun seeing all this chaos. It’s just fun to see what happens when the guards are down and people can “eat themselves.”

The Election Commission needs to take caution on what they say. They’re basically experimenting in this new reality; who actually knows what works and what doesn’t? It’s a live experiment that can very well or very poorly depending on how they decide to play their cards.

It is no longer an option to say not to do some things. People will jump on it and go with it until the dead horse has been beaten and is decaying.

Turman further explained that the Election Commission is, “absolutely prepared and excited to confront the challenges of candidates using the internet in order to campaign and politicize the student body.”

Kudos to the Election Commission. They seem to have this under control.

This column was updated to include additional SGA parties’ information.

Assistant opinion editor Jorden Smith is a political science and creative writing junior and can be reached at [email protected]