Social Media and Politics

Never has social media taken a larger role in politics than in the 2016 presidential election. One of the reasons for this is how the 2 major candidates (plus a large number of underdog candidates) used social media constantly to connect with their base, communicate their thoughts, and promote their campaigns.

I heard an NPR broadcast that called Donald Trump's Twitter arguably the most important social media account in the history of the world. They argued that if someone was able to hack his Twitter account, they could tweet things about starting a nuclear war that could wipe out the entire planet. Something that is also interesting to note about Donald Trump's twitter is that entire currency's have been devalued after he Tweeted about them. This happened to the Mexican peso after he Tweeted a mean remark about Mexico.

For me personally, I was more involved in this election than any other election. I believe that is probably in part due to social media since I am on it fairly often.

Something that I found interesting in the readings for this week was how social media eliminates the middleman when it comes to the communication between potential voter (or constituent) and the candidate (or representative) themselves. This has upsides and downsides. One of the upsides to this is that we get up-to-date information about what the politician is thinking about. We do not have to wait hour or days for news sources to report on what the politician said. This leads to the second good thing about this, which is that the words are coming directly from the politician themselves, so they are not filtered through a third-part media source that may construe what they said for ideological purposes. However, that could also be considered a downside since there is less accountability for what they said. The voter or constituent can look at the social media post written by a politician (Facebook post, Instagram post, Tweet, etc), and believe what the politician is saying even if it is wrong because there is no ombudsman or fact checkers.

In the grad scheme of things, I think social media in politics is a force for good rather than for bad because we can look at the raw data of what the candidate is saying and use our own critical thinking skills to determine the validity of the statements rather than rely on someone else to do it for us since they may be corrupt or have and agenda that they are not telling us.