How Far Media Has Effected Political Campaigns? (Revised) By Jaritza Flores-Garcia

The media industry had affected political campaigns that both cell phones and social media played a major role in political elections every year. For example, according to the Pew Research Center’s article entitled, Cell Phones, Social Media, and Campaign 2014, studies showed that 28% of voters used their cell phones to follow the election while 16% of them followed candidates on social media participated in the 2014 election.

Not only does social media played a big role in campaigns in the US, but it also played its role in campaigns in other countries in the world including the United Kingdom. In the official research service blog of the European Parliament, politicians used personal communication from social media to get people to vote for parties in the UK election.

The first political figure who started the usage of the internet for political campaigns was former candidate Howard Dean who used social media technology to earn more votes during the election.  According to David Iozzi and Lance Bennet in the article, Crossing The Campaign Divide: Dean Changes The Election Game, they stated, “Social networking technologies (SNTs) differ from other internet-based media because
they allow users to contribute original content to websites and because they enable sustainable
self-organizing by bringing people together who are unlikely to have otherwise encountered one
another. They have the potential to transform conventional political practices, bringing about a
new type of campaign characterized by direct citizen involvement and bottom-up grassroots
organizing. As interactive social networking technologies continue to emerge, campaigns must
make strategic choices to either embrace or reject them.” This quote is very adequate that the Internet became a weapon for information so that people would understand and listen to the words from politicians.

Donald Trump became a factor of social media because of his involvement with Twitter that in the New York Times article, Pithy, Mean, and Powerful: How Donald Trump Mastered Twitter For 2016, he used Twitter to maintain his reputation as the current President of the United States of America but creating backlash to his opponents during the election.

I predict that social media became a powerful tool for political figures because of the words they used to make voices heard so they could make a statement about change and how it would affect lives in the real world today and in the future for years to come for the state of the government.

Works Cited

Smith, Aaron, Cell Phones, Social Media and Campaign 2014, Pew Research Center, 2014. http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/11/03/cell-phones-social-media-and-campaign-2014/

Tenhuenen, Susanna, Karvelyte, Vilma, The Role Played By Social Media in Political Participation and Electoral Campaigns, European Parliamentary Research Service Blog, 2015. https://epthinktank.eu/2014/02/12/the-role-played-by-social-media-in-political-participation-and-electoral-campaigns/

Iozzi, David, Bennett, Lance, Crossing The Campaign Divide: Dean Changes The Election Game, University of Washington, 2003. https://depts.washington.edu/ccce/assets/documents/iozzi_bennet_crossing.pdf

Barbaro, Michael, Pithy, Mean, and Powerful: How Donald Trump Mastered Twitter For 2016, The New York Times, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/politics/donald-trump-twitter-use-campaign-2016.html.

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