Snapcampaigning: Scottish Labour gettin down wit da kidz

MARY NEWMAN DECIDED TO TRY OUT LABOUR’S NEWEST SCHEME TO WIN BACK YOUNG VOTERS FROM THE SNP

You know Snapchat? The app originally created so that you could send naughty photos to that guy you met off that other app, Tinder? Or bathroom selfies to your bestie?

What about the one where you take an unattractive photo of yourself and then caption it with your plans for a positive future for Scotland?

This week, Scottish Labour has been getting down with the kidz, yo. With the SNP having hit them hard in most of their traditional stomping grounds, Scottish Labour has decided to target the next generation of voters using Snapchat. Brave, I agree.

It’s part of their wider #MyFutureScotland campaign, which asks young people to send their ideas on how to shape the future of Scotland by tweeting #MyFutureScotland, sending them a Vine, posting an Instagram video or short film (under 2 minutes please guys), or of course Snapchatting scottishlabour.

The idea of sending Scottish labour a message in any of these forms is just a little bit cringy – something akin to Instagramming tea at your nan’s (which will probably be much tamer than 90% of what they receive).

But, as an undecided Scottish voter myself, I decided to fully embrace this new opportunity to participate in democracy. So yeah, I Snapchatted them repeatedly.

Exciting: my very first Snapchat with my new friend scottishlabour. Warning: Inception.

Unfortunately, I don’t personally have any ideas to improve Scotland (I think we all know it’s pretty perfect as it is), so instead I just enjoyed the ability to access the decision makers of my country with nice doodles and requests for comments. Their lack of replies led me to believe they did not enjoy this as much as I did.

Those tears were real… Still haven’t received a reply.

But in all honesty, I don’t know what they expected from the young-people-soberly-or-not-Snapchatting-their-stuffy-lawmakers end of the operation. While Twitter has become a norm, and mentally I can almost justify Instagram and Vine, Snapchat seems like more of a stunt than an actual means of discourse.

Those who seriously want to get involved in #MyFutureScotland (and good on them) will most likely want more than a picture and one line of text to express themselves. Because, frankly, if they’re genius enough to fix Scotland’s future with that amount of feedback, we should just ignore everyone else and let them take it away.