Social Media and Political Engagement
Social media can promote political engagement but it can also be used as a control mechanism for influencing political narratives and silencing dissenters. For example, President Trumps social media accounts were banned from Twitter and Facebook in an unprecedented move by the Big Tech companies to silence what they viewed as a major voice and factor in contributing to a counter-narrative (Oremus, 2022). Likewise, with the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, many voices were silenced on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms for criticizing the prevailing political narrative, for criticizing Dr. Fauci, or for promoting an alternative view of how to treat Covid (Owen, 2020). All of this has ledperhaps not surprisinglyto President Trump developing a new social media platform of his own under a new company called Trump Media and Technology Group that aims to bring TRUTH Social to the market in February of 2022 in conjunction with the free speech advocate Rumble (Peters, 2022). Trump plans not only to offer the public a platform to rival Twitters but also to provide streaming so that alternative voices can share their information without fear that their content will be removed.
It could be said, therefore, that social media has increased political engagement and increased political discourse in general. For a while it appeared that anyone who ran afoul of online fact checkers was suspended or had content removed; but now it seems that a new space is opening up for dissenters, which should contribute to even more political engagement and discourse. Regardless of whether one agrees with Trump or those who have alternative theories on Covid, the...
Social media is the perfect
place for that to happen.
At the same time, it is clear...
…to their respective social media platforms of preference to publicize their views or to criticize the views of others. The coming years will almost certainly be very interesting in terms of whether engagement and discourse flourish or whether they are curtailed and controlled in new ways.
Social media had a lot of promise because it democratized the news and the way information is shared and disseminated. But because the major social media platforms are also major corporations, their impartiality cannot be assumed. The boards of public companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are beholden to investors, and large funds with enormous amounts of capital have a great deal of influence with such corporations; they also have political views and preferences. Social media was once the wild west of political discourse and engagement, but today one faces an uphill battle in trying to untangle the web of genuine engagement and narrative controland nothing exposes that more than the rise of the fact checkers and the…
