Digital Citizenship. How is social media changing election process?
#Last week, I talked about how Tumblr behaves as a digital community and the importance of freedom of speech. This week’s topic will focus on a larger picture, outside of Tumblr, which is Digital citizenship and how social media is changing the election process.
First, let’s look at the definition of a digital citizenship and how to become a “good” digital citizen. According to the Applied Educational System, digital citizenship is described as people use any form of digital devices, the Internet, and social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Tweet and Reddit, etc. In that saying, when you use the internet for simply checking your bank balance or contact with your family/friends/co-workers, you are a digital citizen. A “good” digital citizen are people who use the internet effectively to communicate with others, and create or consume digital information positively (Office of the eSafety Commissioner, NSW Department of Education). However, with the freedom and lack of fact-checking of any social media companies that refer themselves as platformations, it’s easy to become a “bad” digital citizen. The most recent example, the spread of myths around Covid-19 and how to prevent catching the virus, has become problematic for people sharing these myths with the good intention of helping others.
Social media has become a new platform for political campaigns to reach out to younger voters, indeed, everyone. The development of technology and the digital world have turned almost any generation into a part of the digital community. To political campaigns, social media is a new strategy, bringing them to victory, that however doesn’t make the old school approaches such as radio, TV and knocking on doors inefficient, social media just simply opens a new avenue for politicians. This portrait in the American 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton only put up a tweet that she is running for president as the way to inform, this type of informing traditionally required press conference, media, etc, now it can be done with a simple tap. How politicians engage with voters on social media also play an important role, the way politicians interact with their supporters/voters has changed from professional to amateurism since 2012, Clinton applies the traditional style of tweeting, meanwhile Trump’s tweets are very non-traditional, controversial and unpredictable. That results in Trump’s victory of the 2016 presidential run.
As I mentioned earlier, social media platforms still lack fact-checking when it comes to misinformation and fact-checking, that could cause damage to some campaigns. Facebook is one of the examples of this, the CEO, Zuckerberg, has been pressed for the lack of fact-checking of Facebook by Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 at a House Financial Services Committee. Thus, fact-checking is extremely important in this saying, it creates fairness in the competition, and helps avoid the spread of fake news.
Source: https://patriotpost.us/articles/66348-aoc-hits-facebook-for-failing-to-censor-conservatives-2019-10-25
Applied Educational Systems, I. (2020). What Is Digital Citizenship? (And How Do You Teach It?). [online] Aeseducation.com, viewed on 28th Apirl 2020, <https://www.aeseducation.com/career-readiness/what-is-digital-citizenship>.
Enli, G 2017, 'Twitter as an arena for the authentic outsider: Exploring the social media campaigns of Trump and Clinton in the 2016 presidential election', European Journal of Communication, vol 32, no 1 pp 50-61.
Maslow.J, 2019, How is Social Media Influencing Elections?, viewed on 27 Apirl 2020, <https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/how-is-social-media-influencing-elections/>.
Milne.E, 2020, Week 7 lecture: Digital citizenship, Swinburne University of Technology.
