Political Bias in Social Media
There is a new age of how to get news. Most people don’t even watch television to get their new sources. This is because of the growing number of people that don’t have cable packages. The millennial generation is one of the first generations that view things like cable packages a non necessity. Because of this, more and more people are turning to social media to get their news. This creates something called political bias in social media. When all of the politicians have a social media platform and presences, they know that it is the best way to reach the new generation of voters. Barack Obama is one of the most followed people on Twitter (with 106 million followers) and he isn’t even President still.
The website politico says, “authority and respect don’t accumulate on social media; they have to be earned anew at each moment. You’re only as relevant as your last tweet. This shows just how much people going into government now are relying on social media to make them relevant and talked about. If they aren’t talked about online then no one cares about their platform. In cases like Donald Trump, there is no such thing as bad press online. He uses his Twitter as a way to control the masses that have subscribed to his ideals, and he does it well.
The new wave of getting news isn’t new to America. It has happened twice before, with the invention of the radio and the television. In the 1920’s radio gave the people the ability to hear and “be with” the candidates instead of just reading about them, or being lucky enough to hear them speak in your nearby town. Radio was the first step in the direction that allowed more interaction between the public and their public officials.
After that, in the 1960’s, came television. In the 1960s, television gave candidates their bodies back, at least in two dimensions. It was things like the TV that allowed people like JFK to win his presidential election. JFK was charismatic and understanding on screen and people saw someone that wanted to follow. The TV allowed JFK to get the upper hand on who he was running against and actually win.
This phenomenon has obviously translated into the digital age. While the 1920’s had radio, and the 1960’s had TV, the 2000’s has social media. People now have no problems getting their news online, myself included. The downside of this though is how much people will push their own political agenda in social media platforms. Every site is biased, every tweet has been carefully crafted by a team of PR people (or I guess just yourself in Trump’s case). The presidential campaign is becoming just another social-media stream, its swift and shallow current intertwining with all the other streams that flow through people’s devices.
Now this doesn’t have to always be a bad thing. Political bias, when known, is okay. It’s just that no a lot of companies will tell the consumer that was they are reading is biased for their political party. This is how misinformation is spread and how the masses get confused by things that are said online. If companies were to openly report their political biases, there might not be as much trouble online in social media as there is.
