Social media, the new Public Sphere
Social media. The new public sphere? First of all, I’ll start by defining what a public sphere is. A public sphere according to Habermas (1989) is the formation of public opinion that is available to all citizens characterized by a conference in unrestricted fashion (freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom to expression and publication of opinions) about matters of general interest which may include debate over the general rules governing relations. Does social media apply to that definition? Let’s take a closer look. Yes, social media is the formation of public opinion, and yes it is available to all citizens, includes all the freedoms listed above and finally includes debates. Therefore, social media is a public sphere, let’s discuss some of its dimensions.
Social media serves as a stage of self-presentation. It’s a platform where people express themselves, share their opinion and communicate with others. According to Boyd and Ellison (2007), it allows individuals to “construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, make a list of users whom they connect with and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.” Therefore, it is a place or a sphere where public individuals communicate.
Social media can also serve as “a sphere of connection and not isolation, as it serves primarily to connect the personal to the political, and the self to the polity and society” (Papacharissi 2010, 164). This implies that social media plays a role in politics, too. The question though here is whether social media had a negative effect or positive effects on politics or maybe both. These effects revolve around the idea of “who controls information, who consumes information, which information spread, the quality of the information and how that information is distributed.” To answer this question I will be examining the role of social media in both the 2011 Arab spring all the way to the election of Donald Trump.
By 2010–2011, the social networks have increased in number and types from Facebook to twitter and Instagram to Snapchat along with the numerous blogging sites, increasing the freedom of speech and expression. The Arab spring dates back all the way to December 17, 2010 when a man set himself on fire during a protest after his treatment by the police in Tunisia and spread all the way to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen and Bahrain(Smith,2016). Given the social media available at that time news easily traveled and debates and protests suddenly filled the internet.
During the Egyptian revolution, The Facebook page كلنا خالد سعيد (“We are all Khaled Said”) was created by Whael Ghonem after the police brutally beated and killed Khaled Said on June 6, 2010( Fuchs,2017). It has been said that it played a role in the protests that followed after its creation, for it had around 2.5 million likes by December 8, 2012. Even though the survey conducted by eMarketing Egypt, to investigate the role of social media showed that face to face communication and telephone calls were the most important, Curan (2012) argues that “if the rise of digital communications technology did not cause the uprisings, it strengthened them.” Another example is, a week prior to the resignation of the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the total tweets tweeted about a political change in that country ranged from 2300 per day to 230,000 per day (O’Donnell, 2011). Moving on to Tunisia, the day of Ben Allis’s resignation from office around 20% of the blogs were discussing the issue as well as the major topic being blogged was revolved around “revolution.” Conclusively, regarding both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions tweets were spinning the internet from 2,200 by Tunisians and 2400 by Egyptians both after Ben Allis’s and Mubarak’s resignations respectively(O’Donnell, 2011).
In addition to social media being a place for protests and activists communicating and exercising their freedom of speech, social media was a medium that spread news about both revolutions especially in Egypt. Around 84% of people who were online say that they use the internet to get news about the country (Brown, 2012).The threat to that though, is UCG which is the User Generated Content by which people can post anything. However, Manneh of New America Media points out that the credibility of this information is difficult to verify “depending on where it’s from, to whom it’s attributed, [and] especially when various events are happening very quickly”(Brown, 2012). This leaves me questioning whether social media’s role in the Arab Spring was in fact positive or negative.
To better understand that let’s look at the recent election of President Donald Trump and the role of social media in his election. In a world where social media is the new public sphere, it is bound to play a role in the important world events such as the election of Donald Trump. It is evident that social media did play a role since Donald trump himself says that,” I doubt I would be here if it weren’t for social media, to be honest with you,” in an interview with Fox Business network (Mccaskill, 2017). In an interview with the cofounder of Twitter, William, though, he apologizes if it was Twitter that made Trump president and concludes by saying that, “he was wrong thinking that the world would be a better place if there was a platform for everyone to freely speak and exchange ideas” implying the negative role of social media.( Associated Press, 2017).
The bigger issue here was the spread of fake stories during the elections that might have changed the course of the elections. It was found that there were 115 pro-Trump fake stories that were shared on Facebook a total of 30 million times, and 41 pro-Clinton fake stories shared a total of 7.6 million times (Allcott, 2017). That implies that social media did in fact play a negative role in the elections which is evident in the huge amount of fake news spread for both candidates. An example of fake news includes the news spread by the now-defunct website wtoe5news.com that sated that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy (Allcott,2017).That was later on proved to be fake news but regardless many had believed it at that time. Another negative impact was, teenagers using social media to spread fake news about both Trump and Clinton and get in return tens and thousands of dollars(Allcott,2017).In short, in the absence of social media the elections would have definitely changed in way or another.
Hence, social media, the new public sphere, plays a big role in politics from the Arab Spring all the way to the 2016 presidential election in the US. In some ways it had positive effects, (activists communicating, freedom of speech), and in other ways negative, (the spread of fake news and influence).
Sara El Saliby
Bibliography:
Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211–236. Doi: 10.3386/w23089
Brown, H., Gaskin, E., & Mitchell, A. (2012, November 28). The Role of Social Media in the Arab Uprisings. Retrieved March 13, 2018, from http://www.journalism.org/2012/11/28/role-social-media-arab-uprisings/
Fuchs, C. (2017). Social media: a critical introduction (2nd ed.). London: Sage Publications.
MCCASKILL, N. D., Glasser, S. B., Robertson, D., Shafer, J., DiMaggio, S., & Wit, J. (2017, October 20). Trump credits social media for his election. Retrieved March 13, 2018, from https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/20/trump-social-media-election-244009
O’Donnell, C. (2011, September 12). New study quantifies use of social media in Arab Spring. Retrieved March 13, 2018, from http://www.washington.edu/news/2011/09/12/new-study-quantifies-use-of-social-media-in-arab-spring/
Papacharissi, Z. (2012). A Networked Self: Identity Performance and Sociability on Social Network Sites. In Frontiers in New Media Research (1st ed., pp. 207–221). New York: Routledge.
Press, A. (2017, May 20). Twitter leader says he’s ‘sorry’ for social media role in Trump’s election. Retrieved March 13, 2018, from http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/technology/ct-twitter-leader-trump-election-20170520-story.html
Smith, L. (2016, January 25). Arab Spring 5 years on: Timeline of the major events and uprisings in the Middle East. Retrieved March 13, 2018, from https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/arab-spring-5-years-timeline-major-events-uprisings-middle-east-1539085