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The introduction of the internet led to the development of social media platforms as mediums of communication, playing a crucial role in the circulation of news, thus having the power to change not just the message but also the dynamics of the social, political and economic values, corruption and conflicts in politics. Social media in politics can be defined as the use of online social media platforms to the political processes and activities through the use of such platforms as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (Bossetta, 2018). The political activities and processes include all the activities that are involved in the governance of a country, and these include political organizations, corruption, values, parties, and global politics. It should be noted that through the use of social media in the various political process such as election processes, extreme politics, and global conflict, diplomacy around the world has become more public and susceptive tom the public perception.
Social media has created a participatory role for most people to contribute to politics. It has been championed to allow anyone with an internet connection to become a content creator and therefore has gone the extra mile in empowering its users. As a result, it has led to the development of the new media populism that encompasses how people in a country can include the disenfranchised citizens, allowing the public to engage in the political discourse actively. The new media that include social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter enhance the access to political information by the citizens (Haro-de-Rosari, Sáez-Martín & del Carmen, 2018). Through this, it has enabled the dissemination of the political information that counters the mainstream media tactics, which are often centralized and top-down and involve high barriers to entry. According to Howard Rheingold, “the political significance of a computer-mediated communication lies in its capacity to challenge the existing political hierarchy’s monopoly on powerful communications media and perhaps thus revitalize citizen-based democracy.” Through this, Howard characterizes a community that is created on the social networking sites as having the ability to criticize the political hierarchy, hence able to dissolve the monopoly of powerful communications in the political processes.
The role of social media in encouraging participation can also be seen on Derrick de Kerckhove, who described the new technology media as, “In a networked society, the real power shift is from the producer to the consumer, and there is a redistribution of controls and power. On the Web, Karl Max’s dream has been realized: the tools and the means of production are in the hands of the workers.” According to Derrick, social media plays a crucial role in democratization as it allows media participation (Billings, 2017). All the users of social media are able to contribute to the news and as well make comments. However, there are other users of the new media that tend to be passive consumers, and this implies that they only follow the posts and comments but are not actively engaged. The effect of social media is deemed to vary from one country to another, where the local structures are involved in playing a crucial role than social media in determining the citizens’ expression of their perceptions regarding the state of current affairs that involve their states.
Other than the social media being used as a platform for participation, it is also used as a news source. In the United States, adults and any other holder of a social media account imply that they have access to the internet, and this means that they can get political news and other information from their accounts. According to research conducted by Pew Research, 62% of adults in the United States have access to news on social media (Silver et al. 2019). Furthermore, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have played a crucial role in ensuring that people are connected and that they have access to information as they are among the leading social platforms that are preferred by a majority of users to obtain political news. Of all the adult citizens of the United States, 67% use social media platforms, with 44% using the platforms to get news. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report in 2013, the percentage of online news users who tend to blog about news issues range from 1-5%. However, a large percentage of social media users use the platforms to comment on news, with participation ranging from 8% in Germany to Brazil with 38%. However, the online news users are more likely to talk about the news with their friends in an offline mode and even get involved in sharing the information with other social media sites without having to create the content by themselves.
The sharing of information through social media platforms can have an impact on the perception of the public figures, especially the politicians at a faster rate, regardless of whether the information is realistic or not. When the information is propagated through word of mouth from an online source on a specific purpose, the spread of information on the social media platforms for political means can have massive benefits on political campaigns (Araujo, Neijens & Vliegenthart, 2017). However, the spread of negative information regarding political figures can equally be detrimental. For example, for the case of Anthony Weiner, a United States congressman who used Twitter to send inappropriate messages, played a significant role in his resignation. Therefore, when using social media, it is of great significance to reevaluate the purpose and the intentions of the messages and information that we share on social media platforms.
Attention economics refers to an approach to the human management of information that regards humans as a scarce commodity. Social media, particularly the news that is spread through social media platforms, plays a crucial role in the perspective of the attention economy (García-Rapp, 2017). And this is made possible through the content used to attract attention through being seen, shared, and even disseminated far much more than the news content, which tends to gather more traffic from the public. According to Tim Wu, the attention economy is termed as the resale of human attention.
The social media as a communication platform is very persuasive and, therefore, can be used to change or even influence the peoples’ opinions in regard to political views. The reason behind this is due to the abundance of ideas, thoughts, and opinions that are often circulating through social media platforms. Research has it that news use leads to political persuasion, and based on this concept, the more that people use the platforms, as a news source, the more their perceptions in regard to politics will get affected. As a result of persuasion, many people have continued to express dissatisfaction and reduced trust to their government as well as others, and all these can be traced back to social media use. Therefore, social media can be termed to have a direct impact on trust in media use.
It has been proven that reading newspapers has the ability to increase social trust, but watching the news on the TVs weakens the trust in others and news sources. News media plays a crucial role in the democratization of societies as they allow for participation among the citizens (Hyden & Okigbo, 2017). Based on this, when it comes to healthy democratic networks, it is of great significance that the news remains true to the subject such that the trust and perception of the citizens are not affected. In a functioning democracy, a certain amount of trust is essential, and this will enable in keeping trust to the citizens. In contemporary society, younger generations have become more involved in political issues, and this has been attributed to the increase of the political news that has been posted on the various social media sites.
Social media, as a means of communication, has revolutionized how people communicate with each other through sharing information through various social platforms. There are various ways that social media has been involved in conflict management. The social media platforms allow for the information to be framed in the mainstream platforms, and through this, communication is limited. Besides, social media has enabled the quick spread of new stories making them go viral, and this leads to the misinterpretation of the information as people interpret the information based on their understanding (Meinert, Mirbabaie, Dungs & Aker, 2018). Due to the high persuasion rate of social media, there is a high possibility of such social issues such as scandals, corruption, as well as violence on social media platforms. Therefore the strategies and the adaptions of social media can influence the focus amongst the leaders, thus resulting in conflict.
The use of mediated communication through social media has greatly shifted the power structure in the society as it has affected the distribution of information among the various groups that include politicians and other lower-class citizens. As a result, there has been more democratization in regard to power as the citizens have been availed vital information that would otherwise not been obtained if the communication was sourced only through word of mouth. Therefore, social media has empowered the citizens in having to know how their states are run and thus know more about their leaders and what they stand for, and through this, they are able to make the right decision at the time of the election. Thus, we can conclude by saying that social media platforms have empowered the citizens and therefore granted them more power in regards to political participation.
Reference
Araujo, T., Neijens, P., & Vliegenthart, R. (2017). Getting the word out on Twitter: The role of influentials, information brokers and strong ties in building word-of-mouth for brands. International Journal of Advertising, 36(3), 496-513.
Billings, J. (2017). An Agent of Democracy: Evaluating the Role of Social Media in Modern Presidential Elections.
Bossetta, M. (2018). The digital architectures of social media: Comparing political campaigning on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat in the 2016 US election. Journalism & mass communication quarterly, 95(2), 471-496.
García-Rapp, F. (2017). Popularity markers on YouTube’s attention economy: the case of Bubzbeauty. Celebrity Studies, 8(2), 228-245.
Haro-de-Rosario, A., Sáez-Martín, A., & del Carmen Caba-Pérez, M. (2018). Using social media to enhance citizen engagement with local government: Twitter or Facebook?. New Media & Society, 20(1), 29-49.
Hyden, G., & Okigbo, C. (2017). The media and the two waves of democracy. In Media and democracy in Africa (pp. 29-53). Routledge.
Meinert, J., Mirbabaie, M., Dungs, S., & Aker, A. (2018, July). Is it really fake?–Towards an understanding of fake news in social media communication. In International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media (pp. 484-497). Springer, Cham.
Silver, L., Smith, A., Johnson, C., Taylor, K., Jiang, J., Anderson, M., & Rainie, L. (2019). Mobile connectivity in emerging economies. Pew Research Center, 7.
