The Lebanese Law on the election of members of parliament (Law number 44, dated 17.06.2017) regulates media coverage of election campaigning and electoral advertising in print and broadcast media but it doesn’t precisely cover online media and even less social media. The importance of the social media sites in the manner in which either supporting or criticizing the candidates affects the public opinion and therefore the democratic practice. Since democracy is one of KAS core values and as a continuation of KAS effort to support and activate the Media NGOs coalition that was established in 2017 and funded by KAS in partnership with Media Association for Peace (MAP), a study was conducted on monitoring the social media accounts of Lebanese TV channels during parliamentary elections 2018.

The study – done together with Media Association for Peace (MAP) and SKeyes, who also coordinated the work with LADE- evaluates the social media performance of mainstream media during parliamentary elections 2018 according to chapter 6 of the afore-mentioned Law on the election of members of parliament and based on fair, equal, unbiased, peace-oriented and conflict-sensitive coverage criteria. It is based on the daily quantitative and qualitative monitoring of 6 Lebanese TV channels’ accounts on Facebook and Twitter, out of which 3 channels are related to specific political parties (Future, OTV and Manar) and 3 are not (AlJadeed, LBCI and MTV). The monitoring took place during 2 periods of time: The first period was during the last week preceding the electoral silence and the second period was during the week of electoral silence.

The results of the study are collected and compiled in a report in Arabic which can be used as a reference for media monitoring in future elections.