Week 5 Digital Citizenship 1: political engagement
Well, just being honest that I am not really interested in politics. In China, we are not really using social media platforms to engage with politics or for election. So, I will more focus on talking about the social media engagement in the USA.
The relationship between social media and political engagement
According to (Jericho, G. 2012, p.305-306), in September 201, Dr Axel Bruns of the University of Queensland estimated that the total number of Australian Twitter users was around 550,000. However, he determined that only 150,000 of those accounts had more than five followers (and thus were more likely to be real or active accounts). Such numbers aren’t large enough to suggest that an election is going to be won or lost on the Twitter streams. As the number of the active users, there is always large impact in the social media, but as the user amount bigger, the larger influence can be, so we cannot deny that social media really imperceptibly influence people to make the decision of election.
Jericho, G. (2012, p.297) mentioned that “the Obama team’s use of social media during the 2008 election campaign was major focus of its strategy.” It is precisely because Obama understood his disadvantages at the beginning, he did not have strong background, either recognition of large consortia, the only way he can win is to create popularity. So, his team mainly focus on Internet, using grassroots as main battlefield to appeal people. The way Obama did really affect later campaign, more and more candidates used social media.
We all know that Trump is very obsessed with Twitter, according to The New York Times (2 Nov 2019),his more than 66 million Twitter followers have becomes his private polling service, offering what he sees as validation for his performance in office, according to a Times analysis of Pew Research national surveys of adults who use Twitter. That means there is a large amount of people using Twitter is under the age of voting, but it is actually increasing the number of people reading his Twitter to get more and more attention. And just because of the most followers are under the age of voting, he can easily influence teenager’s thoughts and make it as weapon.
So, does candidates still need to use social media for campaign in the future?
My thought on the mater is yes, the analysis of Trump’s followers mostly are teenagers, in the future, more and more people using social media, people in our age is becoming the main part to change the voting and world, so social media is a powerful weapon, and most efficiency to get the attention and audience.
Reference:
Shear, M.D., Haberman, M., Confessore, N., Yourish, K., Buchanan, L. & Collins, K. 2019, "How Trump reshaped the presidency in over 11, 000 tweets (Links to an external site.)," The New York Times, 2 Nov 2019, viewed on 2 April.
Jericho, G. 2012 'How many votes are there on Twitter? download' in The rise of the Fifth Estate: social media and blogging in Australian politics, Scribe Publications Pty Ltd, pp 254 - 278, viewed on 1 April.
