Politics and New Media

Overview

Throughout history, politics and mass communication have had an interdependent relationship. Even George Washington, the first American president, found it necessary to maintain a cordial relationship with the press during his reelection campaign, and he understood the dangers of negative press. Politicians made direct appeals to voters in speeches, political rallies, and campaign tours, and newspapers provided an ongoing link with the public. In the 1920s and 1930s, radio opened up new opportunities for political interaction. By the 1950s, televisions were becoming common in American homes, and 1952 was the first election in which television played a major role in choosing a president. In 1983, home computer use was still low, and only 1.4 percent of the population was connected to the Internet. A result of the technological revolution, the term "new media" began to be used in the early 1990s to differentiate computer-related media from traditional media sources. Scholars have identified four changes that have occurred in politics in response to the rapid rise of new media: opportunities for true representative democracy, opportunities for more interactive technologies, increased political activism, and changes in everyday political events.

By mid-decade, the Internet had become more accessible; and in 1997, Six Degrees, the first social media site, was founded. Developers introduced new softwire applications that provided greater opportunities for collaborative productions. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance, is made up of contributions of a network of writers and editors, resulting in articles that vary greatly in quality. For the first time in history, mass communication was produced by consumers rather than by traditional media elites. E-democracy was highly praised, with its opportunities for online voter registration, electronic town halls, and instant contact to elected officials. In the past, communication had been one-to-many, with a single media source communicating to simultaneous users at the same time. New media transformed communication into many-to-many, providing for simultaneous and constant communication among multiple users. Thus, new media allowed isolated protests to turn into global movements fairly rapidly as with the Occupy movement in 2011 and the #MeToo movement in 2017.

In the twenty-first century, some scholars have claimed that information and communication technologies have led to a transformation in American politics. Two distinct schools of thought developed comprised of political-science oriented scholars on the one hand and technology-oriented scholars on the other. Observers have noted that there has been a tendency for the two schools to talk past one another instead of talking to one another. At Harvard, Arclon Fung, Hollie Russon Gilman, and Jennifer Shkabatur (2013) suggested that the two views of politics could be blended together by viewing the merger of new media and politics as a conveyor belt on which citizens formed interest groups and social movement organizations as they moved along, adding members, mobilizing them, and communicating their beliefs, constantly moving toward government at the end of the conveyor belt.

Fung, Gilman, and Shkabatur created six models designed to measure the impact of digital media on American democracy. The first model deals with empowerment of the public sphere, the second with the displacement of traditional organizations by self-organized digital groups, and the third with opportunities for digital access to democracy. The fourth model is concerned with truth-based advocacy, the fifth with constituent mobilization, and the sixth with crowdsourced social monitoring. They see the first three models as revolutionary, and, therefore, less likely to be successful in transforming politics than the final three models, which occur incrementally.

Most scholars agree that the early promise of new media for promoting greater democracy and egalitarianism has not been fully realized. This is partly because of elitist groups that control sections of new media. Digital giants such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have amassed enormous power. Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, which was charged with examining the interference of Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign, convinced a grand jury that Russian agents and bots had been used to influence voters and make Republican candidates, including Donald Trump, appear more popular than they actually were. Examinations of the resumes of political bloggers have shown them to be more elitist than columnists who write for The New York Timesand the Washington Post.Scholars argue that the tendency of social media to cluster together in like-minded groups has produced "echo chambers" in which people are more likely than not to feel that all right-thinking people agree with their own views.

On the more positive side, grassroot movements around the world have successfully used new media to bypass repressive governments, who have found that it is more difficult to control what is said over the Internet than on television, radio, or newspapers. The Internet was the chief means of communication for protesters involved in the Arab Spring in 2011. In Kenya, political bloggers established the 45,000-member Ushahidi (testimony in Swahili) to spread the word about violence associated with the 2008 election. Other countries, including Liberia, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and Mexico, have established similar movements. Between 2006 and 2013, new media, particularly social networking and microblogging, played an active role in the launching of protests in eighty-seven countries.

Scholars who study the political process have agreed that democracy is dependent on political participation motivated by a desire to learn how the political process works and acquisition of the skills needed to facilitate essential political activity. In a true democracy, activity is the result of being exposed to a range of opinions and then choosing the best policy among those identified. Critics of new media argue that online communication often operates in opposition to democracy because of the tendency for individuals to ignore anything that does not support their own viewpoints. In a 2016 poll taken by the Pew Research Center, 83 percent of social media users said they ignored political comments on social media with which they disagreed. However, access to opposing information may be encountered incidentally as when an individual randomly reads information while using a search engine. Followers of activist celebrities, including feminists Emma Watson and Alyssa Milano, may gain political knowledge when reading about their activities.

Alex Marland, J. P Lewis, and Tom Flanagan (2017) contend that use of new media in politics has helped to centralize government power because political elites use the practice of branding to reinforce messages and avoid conflicts. Party government and public service are, thus, promoted through the combining of a marketing ethos and master branding with communications cohesiveness and message simplicity. An example of political branding is a 2012 order that went out in Britain that stipulated that any department using a government.uk address was required to do so under the royal crest rather through an individual logo.

Applications

The biggest complaint about new media in its early days was that it was available mostly to young, affluent, urban users with high levels of education. However, as computers, Internet access, and cell phones became more affordable, general use climbed dramatically. By 2024, 95 percent of Americans reported having Internet access. Even among senior citizens, Internet use marketedly increased. Similar increases were demonstrated across demographic lines, with 93 percent of White people, 91 percent of African Americans, 95 percent of Hispanics, and 95 percent of Asian Americans accessing the Internet. Most Americans from all classes and with differing levels of education have developed at least basic computer and Internet skills.

The link between Internet access and political participation is well documented. Online forms of political participation include registering to vote, signing petitions, accessing websites, engaging in political discussions, and reading or writing blogs. Social media has also been instrumental in organizing voters to participate in off-line political activities such as mailing out postcards, making telephone calls, handing out campaign literature, and door-to-door canvassing. Individuals who participate in online political activities are also more likely than others to attend political rallies, put up campaign signs, and wear political buttons.

Some experts maintain that local governments, which have traditionally been closer to direct democracy than either the national or state governments, have not lived up to their potential to promote political participation. Local government websites are more likely to promote tourism and provide basic government information than deal with significant issues of local interest. In Belo Horizonte, Brazil, local politicians demonstrated the possibilities of direct digital democracy by allowing citizens to discuss and vote on how to allocate public works funds. A limited form of direct democracy has also been tried in the United States at the national level. In March 2009, President Barack Obama set up Open for Questions, an electronic town hall, on the White House website. Within days, 14,520 individuals had submitted 17,511 questions.

After winning the White House in 2016, Donald Trump continued to relay his opinions and policy announcements directly to the people through his Twitter account. Instead of using social media to promote unity and convey information, the president used the medium to stimulate and rally his base by attacking anyone who offered real or imagined opposition, particularly Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and traditional media but also celebrities, pundits, and the NFL. A Monmouth University poll taken on April 2, 2018, revealed that respondents trusted CNN (45%) more than Donald Trump (35%), and MSNBC (45%) more than Trump (32%). Conservative-leaning Fox News garnered 30 percent of respondents' trust as compared with 20 percent for Trump. Journalists from centrist or left-leaning media consistently pointed with exasperation to Trump's use of false or misleading, inflammatory, and sometimes contradictory statements in his Twitter posts, and even many Trump supporters expressed reservations about the president's apparently impulsive tweets; yet, as presidential memoranda, the Trump tweets entered the historical record and served as his preferred interface with the American people.

During the 2020 presidential election, the number of lawmakers connecting with constituents on social medial significantly increased. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2020 lawmakers made tens of thousands more posts than they did in 2016. Furthermore, they used different language to engage with constituents of both political parties. Those interacting with Democrats often used the words "equality" and "voting" while those interacting with Republicans used the words "bless," "defund," and "liberal." A study conducted by Princeton University found that analyzed millions of tweets found that Twitter's relatively liberal content may have persuaded voters with moderate viewposts to vote for Joe Biden.

On October 15, 2011, a group of activists met in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan to strategize about expanding the emergent Occupy movement. Activists who turned out that day used the Internet to spread their message, and protesters around the world responded. With the goal of exposing the exploitation of the 99 percent at the hands of the world's most affluent 1 percent, Occupy groups were established in 951 cities in 82 countries. In 2009, African American activist Tarana Burke launched what became the #Me Too movement, encouraging women to share their stories of sexual harassment. In 2017 in support of others who had been sexually harassed and one who had allegedly been raped by filmmaker Harvey Weinstein, actress Alyssa Milano, encouraged her followers to tweet #MeToo if they had ever been sexually harassed. Within a week, the movement had spread to eighty-five countries. Together, Burke and Milano launched a global movement and proved the power of new media to effect change as charge after charge led to resignations of political figures, business leaders, and entertainment giants. An offshoot of #MeToo, the #Time'sUp movement was established to provide legal support for victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. In 2017, Timemagazine acknowledged the women who had begun speaking up by naming "Silence Breakers" as its persons of the year.

Discourse

The 2012 presidential election is considered a turning point for the role of new media in a presidential election, and both parties used the combination of smartphones and social media as an essential campaign tool. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter were considered essential avenues of communication and an avenue to victory. At that time, six million users accessed Facebook through smartphones. YouTube, which had established a dedicated politics channel the previous year, was available on 350 trillion devices. By November 1, 2012, Obama's channel had 254,807 subscribers and had recorded more than 262 million views. Romney had 37,633 subscribers and 29.3 million views. On Twitter, Obama had a reported 21.5 million followers. Romney had 1.6 million, but large numbers of his followers were reportedly run by bots that automatically performed programmed actions. On Twitter, Obama generated 7,500 tweets to Romney's 1,300 tweets. Both Obama and Romney and their respective wives were on Pinterest, where Michelle Obama proved to be the more popular with 44,946 followers. Each candidate also interacted with voters through personal websites.

During the 2012 campaign, President Obama employed 750 individuals to run his digital campaign. His opponent Mitt Romney hired 87. That election was the first in which sophisticated techniques were used to target campaign ads and messages on social media to supporters who had already expressed views indicating they were receptive to partisan viewpoints on issues such as abortion, gun control, and immigration. Obama had four times as much contact with Americans through social media as Romney. At the 2012 Republican National Convention, officials handed out Square, a mobile application for processing credit card donations to the Romney campaign and for buying campaign gear, to 5,000 supporters. The app was also available on the Romney website. Obama had released an app to notify supporters of his selection of a running mate in 2008, and the Romney team released a similar app in 2012.

During the Republican campaign in August, in hopes of calling attention to himself, Obama signed in to Reddit and proclaimed, "I am Barack Obama, President of the US – AMA (ask me anything)." Within half an hour, he had received 5,266 questions and comments. By mid-morning, 5.3 million viewers had read the posts, and 100,000 users had signed up as Obama volunteers.

Studies have shown that the social media users most likely to engage in online political discussions are those who are highly partisan, considering themselves as either highly liberal (66%) or highly conservative (64%). By comparison, 47 percent of those who classify themselves as liberals and 41 percent of those who identify as conservatives regularly participated in online political discussions. In response, political candidates began using targeted ads, finding that campaign dollars are 2.5 times as effective when reaching voters who are already supportive of candidates' positions on issues.

In 2018, further information on Republican targeting surfaced with news that Cambridge Analytica had used the digital app This Is Your Digital Life to gain access to private information on 87 million Facebook users. The app had been created by Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian American who taught at Cambridge University. He had reportedly been granted access to information only for academic purposes. Instead, the information was used to create campaign strategies to discredit Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump on Facebook. Facebook faced users' ire and Congressional scrutiny and suspended the company, revised its privacy policy, and promised to "do better."

To help ensure the validity of the 2024 presidential election, Meta announced that it would begin labeling content that was generated by artificial intelligence (AI) on Facebook and Instagram. However, it was reported that the company, along with YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) had removed safeguards against hate speech and misinformation.

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