Social Media & Politics

Ever since the rise of social media outlets in America, U.S politics have and will continue to be forever changed. I would really like to touch on the shift in style of political campaigns and how major social mediums have changed the way candidates reach their audiences and how Americans interact with their candidates in order to elect officials. Social media tools including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have paved a new way for the way political campaigns are run. These sites allow politicians to be a lot more accessible, at the same time carefully crafting and customizing candidates' images based on a rich set of analytics in reasonable time and at nearly no cost. Let me dig into the whys and ways for how particular tools impact U.S politics. First, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube allow politicians to directly connect and pursue their interests with their voters. Next, it has become very common for political campaigns to produce commercials and publish them for free on YouTube, instead of paying for them on television or radio. Not to mention, sometimes journalist's will write about those YouTube ads essentially advertising and broadcasting their message to a wider audience. Twitter and Facebook are also instrumental in organizing campaigns. They allow for like minded voters and activists to easily share information and news on campaign events with one another, hence the "share" button and "re-tweet" functions on both sites. Fundraising for campaigns. Fundraising can be tied together through money bombs and to get large amounts of money in a short amount of time using sites like Twitter and Facebook. Another great attribute is Feedback. Feedback allows for voters and constituents to give their feedback to candidates on particular issues running in the campaign. However, this can turn out to be bad too, stock piles of bad/bias feedback do happen. Finally, using social media for campaigns is hip. It allows for the younger generation to voice their opinions and engage in the campaign more directly and user friendly. All of these tools have easily joined many, many of Americans together, leveraging the numbers to higher extents than ever before and that is why social media sites will forever change the style of political campaigning.