What Role Will Social Media Play in the 2019 Elections?

One of the most important developments in election campaigns over the last couple of years has been the advent of social media. It has primarily changed the ways in which candidates and parties have conducted their campaigns. Social media has fundamentally changed the way in which citizens are exposed to political information. So what is the impact this has on the outcome of an election? It could mobilize certain segments of the election. For example it is mobilizing a younger audience, most use twitter to provide them with information about the election, and it keeps them aware what is going on. During the 2016 election social media was a huge factor. What’s really interesting about the 2016 election is the role that social media played. This is interesting because it works in two opposite directions. On one hand social media allows these elite candidates to talk directly to the people with out having the press in the middle. By having this ability they are able to say whatever message they want to all of their followers very quickly, this is obviously much faster than to have to go through the news. This allows them to have complete control of their own message. This also can lead to this unfiltered state, which we see a lot with America’s new president Donald J Trump. Some of Donald Trump’s personal tweets are a perfect example. His campaign staff very heavily manages some of his tweets, but other ones you can tell are very personal tweets. His tweets have this authentic sort of style to them. They are written as a person or how friends text each other. So that allows this way of working around the press in order to the message out. I think this gives unprecedented power to campaigns. They are able to circumvent news almost entirely. In the other hand we have social media allowing for non-elites to communicate, so before the press was able to talk to most people, but now we have it so that anyone with a twitter account or a Facebook page can go ahead and spread a message and talk to each other. This then leads to a really complex media environment, where there is some centralized control of the messages but a lot of decentralized control, so messages come from the top down but they also really come from the bottom up. This then leads to a really crazy campaign environment. We have all of these different messages floating all over the place. Its not really the coherent way that campaigns have run in the past, where there was a very strong set of discipline messages. What we see now is lots of people participating. So what this leads to is having a lot of discussions that are all happening at the same time. Instead of having one main discussion that’s happening on the news; we have many other different discussions online. We even have conspiracy theorist, we have all these different people who are spreading messages that haven’t been checked out and we don’t know if its true or not. No matter what these messages get circulated nonetheless and what happens in a polarized political environment is that people will believe what they want to believe. This was seen a lot towards this year’s election. So I believe that in 2019 social media will have a more of an impact. Social media will still have the ability to have those worldwide discussions, but one of the main focuses I think will be looking out for fake news. I believe there will be some sort of new platform that detects the truth.