As of 2022, the United States has the third-largest social media audience worldwide, after China and India. It is home to over 302 million social media users at a social networking penetration rate of 90 percent (Statista, 2022).
The 2020 presidential election had the highest voter turnout of the 21st century, with 66.8% of citizens 18 years and older voting in the election, according to new voting and registration tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau (Census.gov, 2021).
U.S. citizens are casting their votes for candidates that speak to the causes they are interested in and how they communicate to them.
If you look at the current President and Vice President of the United States many would say they are not great orators or communicators. That’s the beauty of social media. Carefully crafted messages are able to reach millions without speaking a word. Strategic communication teams filled with writers, influencers, social media experts and political masterminds develop polished products that shield from mistakes.
They were both recently in front of the media to talk about unidentified flying objects to include a Chinese spy balloon.
After delivering his first public remarks on the flying objects shot down by the U.S. military in recent weeks, President Joe Biden refused to answer any questions, saying reporters "can come to my office and ask that question when we have more polite people." "Give me a break man," Biden on Thursday told reporters who were yelling questions after the president concluded his comments (Wilson, 2023).
Vice President Kamala Harris had a one on one interview with MSNBC. Twitter users mocked Vice President Kamala Harris for another meandering, wordy answer that ended with her claiming that the Chinese spy balloon that the U.S. shot down in its airspace was "not helpful" for U.S.-China relations (Hays, 2023).
Those that don’t agree with the President and his way of leading American grab onto these engagements and highlight them on social media as a way to inform or disrespect depending on the narratives and political leanings.
Some of these people amplifying this information have financial motivations more than anything. Political advertising spending in the United States is expected to amount to over 9.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2022 (Statista, 2023).
Social media giants along with traditional media see politics and political advertising as a never ending money generator. But when they pick and choose what money to take and what to allow on their platforms it can get a bit tricky and amp up the talks of changes to Section 230.
Politicians as a whole are generally not trusted by the public.
When Trump ran for president in 2016 it wasn’t the first time he ran for president as he also ran for president in 2000 but people were tired of the revolving door of politicians saying the same thing and getting the same results. Trump was an outsider to the political circles but he still had to work within the political system that was created in a way that one person cannot be the be all end all. He was soon seen as the face of the Republican party.
There have been multiple lawsuits against Facebook and Twitter but they have been protected as they state they only host information and do not publish. The banning of elected government officials based off social media posts may show that they censor at the source. By banning or shadow banning accounts the account owners cannot communicate with their audience or followers.
When President Trump was kicked off of multiple social media sites along with others of his staff a large portion of the American public that are Republicans or Trump supporters lost access to information he had posted over the years.
The Twitter files have exposed that social media companies are working with different government agencies to publicize certain information, ban other information and monitoring Americans social media accounts.
According to Fujiwara, Muller, & Schwartz, “We document that political content on Twitter has a pro-Democratic slant. We classify the slant of tweets based on two complementary approaches: one based on the network users follow and one using the text of tweets in a machine learning approach in the spirit of Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010).
We apply these methods to the over 460 million tweets mentioning the presidential candidates in the 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections. We find that the number and attention (proxied by “likes”) of tweets mentioning Trump was substantially larger than that of those mentioning Clinton and Joe Biden.
Moreover, tweets about Trump in 2016 and 2020 70% more likely to have Democratic rather than Republican slant. Overall, our results are consistent with Twitter and its relatively pro-Democratic content persuading voters with moderate views to not vote for Trump without inducing a more general negative effect on Republicans.
As politicians play dirty the increase in misinformation and fake news continues to permeate social media fees.
Fake news and misinformation has undeniably been on the rise in recent years. But our susceptibility to it is, in part, actually a symptom of a lack of critical thinking skills suitable for the digital age, argues Helen Lee Bouygues, who launched her organization, Reboot Foundation, to tackle that exact problem (Sonnemaker, 2020).
I remember during the weeks ramping up to election day I would get texts, emails and see many ads on my social media accounts attempting to inform and sway me towards certain politicians. I would do my research on new candidates and incumbents. Those that had slick websites and social media presence made it easy to see where they stood on issues. But it takes some thinking on the voters part to dig past the top layer of information and see what else may be hidden or something that contradicts what they are portraying.
Social media is easy to front-load information to millions of users. With political advertising it can be a challenge to engage with those that are just turned off to politics. But those turned off to politics may still want to vote for someone that aligns to their values even if when they are elected they don’t follow through or even change priorities based on politics.
References
https://www.statista.com/topics/3196/social-media-usage-in-the-united-states/
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/2020-presidential-election-voting-and-registration-tables-now-available.html
https://www.foxnews.com/media/harris-mocked-new-word-salad-saying-spy-balloon-not-helpful-u-s-china-relations-master-words
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-shuts-down-questions-on-spy-balloon-scolds-journalists-to-be-more-polite/
https://www.statista.com/topics/4942/political-advertising-in-the-us/#topicOverview
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-internet-social-media-fuel-polarization-america-facebook-twitter-youtube-2020-12 https://www.princeton.edu/~fujiwara/papers/SocialMediaAndElections.pdf
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