Friends don’t always vote

Opinion: June 4, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

The crushing defeat of Colombia’s opposition candidate Antanas Mockus — who had a record following on Facebook — in last Sunday’s first-round elections confirms what I have long suspected: The political and business impact of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has been widely overrated.

Mockus, a former university president and mayor of Bogota, had drawn international attention in recent months for becoming one of the world’s politicians with the greatest numbers of “friends” on Facebook.

In addition to more than 150 independent Facebook pages supporting his campaign, Mockus’ official Facebook page gathered more than 700,000 “friends.”

Newspapers covering the Colombian elections credited social media for Mockus’ meteoric rise in the polls.

A week before the May 30 first-round vote, Mockus had risen from virtually nowhere to a tie with government-backed candidate Juan Manuel Santos, with 34 percent of the vote each. Ecstatic pro-Mockus bloggers were already referring to their candidate as “the world’s first Facebook president.”

But on Election Day, Santos won a landslide with 47 percent of the vote, and Mockus ended a distant second with 21 percent. The two candidates will now go to a runoff June 20, which Santos is expected to win easily.

Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.