NICHES of social media — particularly Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — have become a battleground for candidates eyeing national and other key posts. Political propaganda aimed at capturing hearts and minds rages at its fiercest in cyberspace. Why?

Every Facebook friend or fiend of yours is a multiple of 100, according to conservative ad agency estimates — and every whit of messaging, political agitprop, or nonsense ripples out to 100 people that, in turn, are likely to share such until the ripple becomes a storm surge.

A significant section of the nation’s 54-million-strong voting population is into social media. Some 2/3 of them, or 38 million netizens (as of 2014), are youngsters below 30 years old. Interestingly, 85 percent of the country’s 30-million Facebook users are voters.

The Commission on Elections itself confirms that “20 million, or 37 percent of registered voters, are young people aged 18 to 35 who are social media savvy.” At their fingertips are personal computers, laptops, ipads, smartphones and such portable devices.

Into the week of Feb. 23-27 when the nation celebrated the 30th year of the EDSA People Power revolt, President Noynoy Aquino took to the hustings to bash vice presidential candidate Sen. Bongbong Marcos, urging the electorate not to vote for the late strongman’s son and namesake.

As if the EDSA rostrum and traditional media platforms were not enough, the negative campaign was carried on further in social media, obviously for rapid wider reach. As it turned out, however, most people no longer fall for partisan talk that easily.

All politics is local and personal. It is now mostly at the digital grassroots where electoral reckoning takes place – and, thanks to information and communication technology, it happens in geometric pattern at greater speed.

It seems that most millennials prefer to gauge a candidate’s competence and capacity for sound governance through their own personal evaluation — not by listening to partisan prattle. They bother to dig underneath the mud being slung around.

In the Pulse Asia survey that engaged 2,500 respondents that same week when the bashers were having a field day, the voters had their say.

The survey involved secret balloting, a departure from the usual one-on-one pollster interview. Respondents were asked to fill out mock ballots (then folded and deposited in a ballot box) with the names of their preferred candidates.

Grace Poe — her presidential bid dragged down by a string of disqualification cases that were yet to be decided at that time by the Supreme Court — earned a 25 percent share of the votes, taking the top spot among presidential candidates.

Bongbong Marcos, the target of the Aquino administration-Liberal Party bashing, emerged top pick for vice president, taking 26 percent of the total votes cast.

It seems the teams handling Poe and Marcos have been engaging the electorate in multiple media and cyberspace platforms and succeeding.

Politicians with grand plans could take a cue from the handlers of US President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign that clinched for him a fresh mandate. He roared through America like a tidal wave, riding on a clutch of IT apps to engage and connect with voters and supporters.

Present-day political campaigning is akin to selling a service and convincing the electorate to “buy” that with their votes. This entails expert engagement with a 54-million-strong consumer base, most of them immersed in social media, young, tech savvy and wide-awake.

■ Proposal for free MRT beep cards nixed

UNKNOWN to the more than half-million Metro Rail Transit daily riders, the beep cards they use to board trains could have been given to them at no cost under a proposal in 2012 of then MRT-3 General Manager Al Vitangcol III.

Vitangcol, who was appointed manager by then Transportation Secretary Mar Roxas, is now facing graft charges arising from anomalies in the MRT system blamed on him and several others.

In July of 2012, Vitangcol proposed in a letter to Roxas a “Pilot Contactless Automatic Fare Collection” system “to cushion the impact of the coming ‘death’ of the AFC system” and said that “efforts were done to engage a proponent… to supply a Contactless AFC System, all at no cost to the government and to the riding public.”

Vitangcol asked Roxas for direction as to how the problem about the beep cards should be addressed, noting that the secretary was in the habit of ignoring letters. He cited proposals that could have been accepted where the beep cards would be free for at least the first one million cards.

AF Payments Inc., an Ayala Corp.-led consortium, won the contract to set up a P1.72-billion automatic fare collection system for the LRT Lines 1 and 2 and the MRT 3, known as the Beep Card.

The project, in joint venture with Metro Pacific Investments Corp (MPIC), allows commuters of the three elevated railways in Metro Manila to transfer from one train to another using the unified ticket. In the past, commuters who had to transfer between the LRT lines and the MRT-3, which ran on two different payment systems, needed two payment cards.

However, instead of buying only the load, riders can now only buy the beep card for P100, automatically with a reduced P20 that goes to the Ayala firm, so that the load is only P80. In succeeding uses, the beep card can be loaded with as little as P11 up to a maximum of P10,000 and then can be used up to four years.

Why did the DoTC reject a proposal allowing the riding public, especially poor commuters and students, to save P20 for the beep card? Instead, the P30-million (1.5 million cards x P20/card) add-on cost has been fed to the maws of the giant Ayala firm.