Social Media, The New Public Sphere?
Social Media used to be controlled by some parties only. Later, social media changed the state of things and how they will look like in the future, by changing the quality of information, who controls it and which information is distributed and in what ways. Nowadays, the information is controlled by various users such as politicians, bloggers, mass news media that influence a lot of people and etc. Social media influences people’s political beliefs, being the second factor that influences political opinions after families. Social media changes two important elements of political socialization by giving the authority to the individual to choose the content they want to view, which leads individuals to gain more power and control over their actions. However, by this way, people will be subjected to only specific point of views, and avoid having dialogues with different point of views. Second, social media allows politicians to shape their content. But is it good to have people view only the content they want to view? Gainous J. & Wagner K. (2014) claim that “the implication of consuming only the information you prefer to see has some clear consequences in the political sphere”. Examples could be filter bubbles and political polarization. Filter bubbles are when users are subjected to only contents they want to see. As in, they get suggestions to what they would most likely want to view, which has negative consequences often, because in this case the consumer will only be subjected to similar point of views like his, and will not be subjected to other kinds of point of views. Therefore, this kind of isolation exists because of social media, which also leads to political polarization. Political polarization is the way a person views a person or a policy due to the political party they support or identify with. Filter bubbles and echo chambers due to social media increase political polarization. “Self-insulation and personalization are solutions to some genuine problems, but they also spread falsehoods, and promote polarization and fragmentation.” Sunstein, C. (2017). Therefore, social media giving individuals the freedom and authority to control what they want content they want to view and the filter bubbles that exist on social media all have negative consequences on the political sphere in the world. However, social media does have a positive influence on politics, because social media and the internet are the major reason why new political movements and new kinds of mobilization exist by having the world communicating together (politicians, influencers, people around the world in general) through media. Other negative aspect of social media is that fake news spreads faster than the truth. People usually share the fake news more than they would share the actual news because they tend to believe the fake news. This actually affects politics in various ways. Since people believe every information they encounter online, this means that when they see a specific good information about a specific politician, they will immediately start liking that politician and consider voting for him and vice versa. If the fake information found online about a specific politician is bad, people will believe it and therefore share it and therefore it will be exposed to the whole world and so people’s political beliefs and opinions will be influenced and therefore altered because of this fake news. According to (Allcott, H. & Gentzkow, M 2017, p. 212) before the 2016 elections, the most fake news stories told were supporting Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, so many commentators claimed that Mr. Trump got only elected and became the president of the United States, only because of the influence of the fake news on the people. However, regardless of all of these negative consequences of social media on politics, there are still some positive outcomes. Social media helps politicians that are elected promote themselves by broadcasting their campaigns through social media without costing them anything, and it is easier for the voters to interact with the candidate through Facebook, Twitter, etc. Sometimes, some of these campaigns by politicians are for fundraising and are shared through social media such as Facebook or Twitter. It is when the politician will try to make his voters donate money and is usually successful because of the amounts of share the content will have. However, most of the times people share the content because they want to seem “supportive” or “cool”, or they want to show their friends or the world a good image of themselves that is most probably not even true. This is highly linked to Narcissism. In fact, a study by Kaya, T. & Bicen, H. (2016) showed that there is a high correlation between the number of Facebook updates one posts and narcissism.
As mentioned above, social media contributes to the political life. However, some aspects have been changed. For example, “traditional campaign behaviors, such as television advertising, do not have the same impact as before”. Gainous J. & Wagner K. (2014). So nowadays political memes actually go viral more than these campaigns. Bowles, N. (2018) claims that Mr. Braynard the former director of data for Mr. Trump’s campaign said that political memes are almost like a new means of communication. Some of the visual examples are provided below about political memes. (view appendix below).
In conclusion, social media has both negative and positive consequences on politicians and politics in general. All of the fake news, filter bubbles, echo chambers found on social media affects politics and cause polarization. However, social media does help politics by broadcasting the candidates’ campaigns and facilitating communication between the candidates’ and their voters.
References:
Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election. Retrieved from https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf
Bowles, N. (2018, February 09). The Mainstreaming of Political Memes Online. Retrieved March 13, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/09/technology/political-memes-go-mainstream.html
Kaya, T. & Bicen, H., (2016). The effects of social media on students’ behaviors; Facebook as a case study. Computers in human behavior, 59, 374–379.
SUNSTEIN, C. R. (2018). #REPUBLIC: divided democracy in the age of social media. S.l.: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRES
