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Essay / Political significance of social media
The characteristics of new media due to their plasticity and interactivity as open and non-hierarchical participation have made social media attractive to many of its users. Social media and other forms of new media have both advantages and disadvantages in making the world more democratic. To some extent, the rise of social media has made the world more democratic because it is accessible to the common person and encourages political engagement. Conversely, it has also made the world less democratic due to its content and context, as well as the use of social media as a tool of propaganda and censorship. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayThe media has political importance in its role as the fourth estate in a liberal democracy to maintain checks and balances on the government, facilitate public discourse, informing and representing the public. Most mass media emerged with the development of new technologies enabling mass communication in the 19th and 20th centuries. The development of new media such as social media has enabled the fastest and most widespread dissemination of information. Hague, Harrop and McCormick defined social media as an interactive online platform with designated recipients, which facilitates collective or individual communication for the exchange of user-generated content and links mass communication and personal communication. Social media has been increasingly influential and its growth has been unprecedented with the rise of technology. The accessibility of social media and its commercial availability have played a significant role in immersing the ordinary individual into the inaccessible realm of politics. Jay Rosen has described this notion of social media as “politically infused participatory media” (Trottier and Fuchs, 2015). This emerging notion has been fueled by the global adoption of social media by politicians, political activists and citizens as a way to engage, organize and communicate their views. The manifestation of global politics in social media can take many forms, from popular culture and memes to satirical videos and articles that may mislead readers. However, the creation of these products encourages the democratic engagement of citizens in the creation and development of opinions in which individuals can differ, negotiate and adapt to power relations. These products can also create a common bond that binds an increasingly divided nation, as Benedict Anderson has argued that the modern nation-state is best understood as an "imagined community" through the sense of cohesion felt by citizens of 'a modern nation that is both artificial and facilitated by mass media (Hull, 2017). The dynamics of media and politics can also change, shape and structure the political process, the public sphere, organizations, institutions and actors (Stromback and Esser, 2017). An example of this is the use of Twitter as a platform for online interaction during the 2011 Arab Spring to organize massive public protests that led to the collapse of the Mubarak regime. The social and personal nature of politics means that reflections of narratives, norms and values produced by society are reflected in the media consumed. In this sense, the accessibility of social media and its political content become closely linked and can becomeunconsciously political as politics and political subjectivity are interpreted and reconstituted by citizens. Although democracy is complex and multifaceted, the rise of social media has made the world more cohesive. Through the sense of shared reality and digital democracy, as Sidney Kraus and Dennis Davis have argued, political reality is formed by mass communication reports that are discussed, modified and interpreted by the citizens of society (Kraus and Davis, 1976). Furthermore, it can be argued that politics on social media is considered a vital form of political participation. Media in democracies is characterized by a free flow of information through multiple open channels. However, it may not seem as democratic due to the presence of bias and the commercialization of social media. Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs hypothesized that social media is primarily a phenomenon of state and corporate power in which powerful corporate and state interests are present and collide, as evidenced by the existence of a surveillance industrial complex that controls communication on social media and is made up of a collaboration of social media and Internet companies, secret services and private security companies. Social media politics are inherently shaped by a factor of resources such as visibility, attention, money, reputation, influence and social connections. Peter Dahlgren has argued that politics is increasingly organized as a media phenomenon, planned and executed for and with the cooperation of the media (Dahlgren, 2001). Thus, bias is present and has always been present in the media, in all online sources, and calls into question the form of objectivity towards the reader that can have a significant impact on policy. The term "filter bubble" was coined in 2010 by Eli Pariser to characterize an Internet phenomenon where individuals only receive the type of information that they have pre-selected or that third parties have decided. An example would be Facebook's News Feed advertising, which determines the interests of its users based on data collected while browsing and likes, to determine their demographic information and core political beliefs (Hull, 2017 ). This creates other problems such as confirmation bias which limits the ability to question information and tends to create polarized groups. Conversely, Chapman Rackaway argued that the effects of media bias are minimal (Rackaway, 2014). Another bias worth noting within all forms of media is commercial bias, in which media content is sponsored by politically motivated groups, which may be due to scarcity of funding sources. This is important for making the world more democratizing, as the media is increasingly becoming one of the dominant institutions in the public sphere and is increasingly integrated into the political and social domain. The rise of social media has presented a platform for political communication. However, the democratization of this phenomenon depends on the political system and the use of communication technologies to manipulate the media and the public by the state. Within authoritarian regimes, media and public relations are tightly controlled with manipulated content, limited freedom of expression, and media channels limited by the state. While traditional media are more easily controlled, authoritarian ideologies can infiltrate and persist in more progressive media (Khrisna-Hensel, 2018) through.