Essay: To what extent has social media changed the political landscape?

Introduction
Social media is one of the most widespread constructs of the digital age, reaching all parts of the world and our lives, with Facebook having 1.6 billion daily users as of 2018 and that only accounts for 66% of all monthly users (statista.com). Meaning that 2.4 billion people use it on a monthly basis, that’s a third of the population of the entire population of the planet. It’s no wonder 71% of United States business use Instagram (statista.com) to reach possible customers or clients. Over the last 15 years the prevalence of social media has skyrocketed and it’s no surprise almost everyone is using it for just about anything whether that be for personal use, pursuing careers in modelling, film, photography and more, advertising to customers, or even to gain political following. In this essay, I intend to explore the usage of social media and how it has affected the political stratosphere.
Global Perspective
The United States
Recent times has seen the election of one of the most outspoken and controversial presidents and his main method of communication, Twitter. United States’ President Donald J. Trump has used his staggering Twitter following, of now more than 55 million (twitter.com), as major factor of advertisement during his presidential campaign. It allowed him to speak about current events as well as his views on topics outside of talk shows, rallies, and other campaign related events, it’s also one of the most inexpensive forms of advertisement, barring getting a social media manager, as all it really costs is your time. He could be sending and making his tweets anywhere at any time even on the toilet or while in a cab. It even allows communication to many younger voters seeing as they are the main target demographic of social media with 90% of adults aged 18-29 using social media ( (Perrin, 2015). When asked about his usage of Twitter Trump has stated ‘I like it because I can get my point of view out there.’ However it is not, the only form of social media and Trump is not the only one to use it, his main opponent Hillary Clinton also used other social media such as Vine a popular comedy app, and recently Joe Biden the former Vice President has even announced he would be making a series on Instagram’s IGTV in which he discusses major social and political issues and explains them to the watchers. Even Kenneth Mejia, a green party candidate for congress who in contrast to the red and blue party candidates are completely donation funded, who got less than 5%(ballotpedia.org) of the votes in the previous congressional election recently found himself getting 27.5%(ballotpedia.org) of votes against the previous and current congressman for Los Angeles Jimmy Gomez and a major factor in that vast increase was through the use of social media namely Twitter and Instagram, not only has he gained a following of 20,000+ people but has also used it to speak on issues, share his views, and allows for people to share what they see of him and discover him so much that he now has 41,711 people who have voted for him (ballotpedia.org), which is the most ever attained by a Green party candidate in a congressional race. The use of social media is so vast the government is considering online voting in an attempt to increase the number of voters as accessibility to voting stations is a major reason for people not voting. In the past people had to pay for ads to be placed or be aired on television and unless we got to witness them live at an event everything we know about the political candidates we hear would be from that and details would be skewed, things left out or not spoken about. Social media has not just proven beneficial to the political powerhouses but has also been of great impact to the everyday person, and more specifically their voice.
I will now discuss how social media has affected the political landscape on a global scale. Social media has proven an effective tool for people to express themselves, that was one of its main purposes, but I doubt that people would have expected it to transform into what it is. As of late it has been used as a form of activism and to evoke change in the world. Thousands of people have created activism accounts which have been gaining popularity since early 2017. These accounts speak about and inform people about atrocities and occurrences that are taking place worldwide such as the copious amounts of school shootings that take place in the United States and leading from that talking about gun control, or human trafficking taking place worldwide, and any other social injustice, even just explaining why certain things are bad, why certain things are needed, or why certain things or people are wrong. They also help news get around about not talked about issues and events. To put it simply, they allow news to reach more people, because it reaches more people, more people are informed which in turn allows those people to tell their governments what they, the citizens of their country what they want as well as stand for the things they believe in, stories not being covered by news outlet also get the chance to be heard and reported about due to it being spoken about on these accounts. In the past, all news information was distributed by either word of mouth, read on a newspaper, or watched on news channels. News outlets and papers were and still are incredibly biased because only certain information and what the people at the news companies want you to find out is what would get spoken about, in fact this is still the case with a lot of news agencies many stories and people’s stories are ignored or brushed over because they may be considered uninteresting, or the news channels ratings go down when talking about certain things. The Sentencing Project, which is a group aiming to undertake the task of reducing the rate of internment in United States’ prisons, as well as focus on eliminating racial bias in the United States’ judiciary system, found in a study that African Americans were depicted as more dangerous or violent when compared to Caucasian counterparts, which included being not named, being shown poorly dressed, and pictures showing they had been apprehended by police more commonly known as ‘mug shots’. An example of this would be the case of Chris Watts and Anthony Milan Ross. In both cases the men killed their 2 kids and wife, however when BBC news reported Chris Watts it portrayed him more closely to a regular person, the first picture in the article is of him and his family smiling and throughout are pictures of his daughters or him and his wife and in all of these they appear to be happy and smiling. Contrary to that when Anthony Ross was reported for an extremely similar crime, in the article published by AZFamily all the pictures of him are a mug shot and him in prison uniform taken from a security camera, the other pictures were of police with guns pointed, and police cars outside where he lived. These two articles paint particularly different pictures of the men involved in almost the same crime, one depicted as a regular happy person, and the other criminalized immensely in comparison.
National perspective
For my local perspective, I will be doing the country I live in, UAE. The United Arab Emirates government uses social media to communicate with its denizens profusely. It does this in an attempt to raise participation in events and other affairs organized, for example from October 26th to November 24th the country organizes the Dubai Fitness Challenge 30×30 as part of its aims for Vision 2021, in which it is attempting to make UAE into a better country in all aspects, the government not only created an app to track and log exercise done within the event but also acts as a social media in an attempt to entice more people to take part, there are also hashtags for Instagram and a music video ad that is played on YouTube and Instagram again to get more people wanting to do it. It was designed in such a way because social media is a large part of many people’s lives, especially in a country like United Arab Emirates in which, according to Global Media Insight, 99.26% of the population actively use social media and the average person spends 2 hours and 56 minutes daily, using social media would be an effective tool to get people to take part in events such as the Fitness Challenge, the Energy Conservation Social Media challenge also started by the UAE government and more. Dubai also uses an algorithm relying on social media to measure the happiness of its citizens as the happiness of its citizens is of great importance to the government and by 2020 they aim to attain 90% happiness according to the Happiness Index.
Personal Perspective
Conclusion
In conclusion social media is a highly effective tool for many different situations and its effects on the political landscape are vast as they range from activism, allowing communication between the government and inhabitants, as well as aid political candidates both large and small in their respective campaigns. Overall it has had a massive
impact on the political landscape and this change should be wholeheartedly embraced for all its positives.