Poverty Alleviation & Human Development: Comparative Analysis of Facebook pages of top three political parties of Pakistan during 2018 Election Campaign

This research focuses on the coverage of poverty alleviation on Facebook pages of top three political parties of Pakistan i.e. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) and Pakistan People’s Party. This research employs quantitative content analysis to determine the importance given to poverty alleviation and human development by Pakistani political parties on their Facebook pages. Results concluded that poverty alleviation or human development has not been the priority of top three political parties of Pakistan, but if we compare the selected three political parties, PTI took lead in discussing the poverty alleviation and human development on their official Facebook page during 2018 election campaign, whereas PMLN was neck to neck with PTI. On the contrary, PPP gave least priority to poverty alleviation or human development.

Muslim League (Nawaz) and Pakistan People's Party.
As the concept of poverty alleviation has become very broad, issues related to poverty alleviation during election campaigning were divided into two parts, one is direct measures to eradicate poverty and the second is indirect measure. As Azeem (2016), in his doctoral thesis holds that "vulnerability to monetary poverty cannot serve as a proxy for vulnerability to nutrition poverty, and vice versa.
Households facing the risk of nutrition poverty will miss the benefits of anti-poverty policies based solely on the monetary measure of poverty". Today, human development index has become a benchmark to check the quality of living, in order to ensure transparency into the research, range of poverty improvement indicators (e.g. education, infrastructure development and health etc.) were added into indirect measures of gauging poverty alleviation programme of the three political parties.

Statement of the Problem
There is no or very little work done to explore the social media accounts of Pakistani Political Parties. This research exercise intends to understand that whether the mainstream political parties of Pakistan give proper attention to the poverty alleviation or not. Social Media in general and Facebook has become a powerful influencing agent in Pakistan. As mentioned above, there are more than 3.5 million active Facebook users, and 92 percent of internet users in Pakistan use Facebook. In other words, technology is shaping the opinions around the world, therefore expressions of social media have its worth, and rather it has been expanding with every passing day. (AlphaPro, 2018) There has been range of studies done on media priming effects in politics for example, (Domke, 2001;Iyengar & Kinder, 1987;Krosnick & Brannon, 1993;) This study takes priming into consideration to comprehend the relationships between social media platforms of Pakistani political parties and selection of certain issues for facebook feed. Scheufele & Tewksbury (2007) argued that "The temporal sequence of agenda setting and priming assumes that media can make certain issues or aspects of issues more accessible (i.e., easily recalled) for Freedom of choice is central to the approach: someone choosing to be hungry (during a religious fast say) is quite different to someone who is hungry because they cannot afford to buy food. Ideas on the links between economic growth and development during the second half of the 20th Century also had a formative influence. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and economic growth emerged as leading indicator of national progress in many countries, yet GDP was never intended to be used as a measure of wellbeing. In the 1970s and 80s development debate considered using alternative focuses to go beyond GDP, including putting greater emphasis on employment, followed by redistribution with growth, and then whether people had their basic needs met. These ideas helped pave the way for the human development (both the approach and its measurement). Two coders were employed to code the data. In order to ensure the reliability of coding, Holisti's (1969) formula," was used, which is "Agreement = 2N/ N1+N2 " Where N is the total number of coding decisions the two coders agreed upon, and N1 and N2 are the numbers of coding decisions by the 1st and the 2nd coder, respectively. When two coders are coding the same pieces of content, this formula remains the same as percent agreement.
Agreement=2(261)/283+283=92.22%, so after applying formula 92.22% reliability was achieved.  This study has examined the assumptions regarding priming and media ecology theory. The very angle of self-priming by all the selected parties was noticed in the study by highlighting and choosing specific issues. Most of the Facebook posts by political parties focused on non-developmental issues like mudslinging of opponents, party activities and election campaign organization. As the social media teams of the Facebook pages of political parties enjoy total control over the content posted by the officially designated teams, show that that these parties still prefer selfprojection, especially PPP followed by PMLN and PTI as well. (See Table 1 and Table 2). In future, issue of self-priming by individuals or interest groups should be studied to minimize blaming mainstream media for every evil.
Whereas humanist angle of media ecology theory was also tested, which showed that PTI and PMLN discussed the issues related to poverty alleviation and human development much more than PPP. Today, Marshal McLuhan's words in 1964 "medium is the message" have proven to be more relevant, as this social media has shifted the whole information dissemination paradigm. The emergence of social media has given much power to individuals and interest groups and they are no more dependent on traditional media, and these groups are to be blamed for their media projection on social media, as they themselves choose what would be shared and discussed. So, the humanist angle of media ecology theory is compromised as far as the coverage of human development on Facebook pages of top three political parties is concerned.