scholarly journals Social media and democracy: How the Facebook usage patterns of Toronto city councilors influence political engagement

Author(s):  
Christian Campbell

In the early days of the Internet, many political communication theorists held the utopian belief that political actors would use online tools to communicate directly with members of the public, and thereby bolster political engagement and enrich democracy. Unfortunately, studies over the past two decades found that political websites were not usually used to interact directly with the public, but instead were used to simply disseminate information in a one-way information-sharing model. However, the emergence of social media sites presents political actors with the opportunity to interact with the public far more easily than websites had previously allowed. Given the widespread adoption and high usage rates of social media sites, these online resources could potentially open up a space for public discussion about politics and allow political actors to interact directly with members of the public. Literature indicates that this type of shared space is conducive to the kind of civic mindset that leads to higher rates of political engagement. Research on political uses of social media tends to focus on the use of social media engagement. Research on political uses of social media tends to focus on the use of social media within elections, such as the 2008 U.S presidential election, and on the use of social media by national governments. I have chosen instead to examine how a group of municipal councilors in Toronto, Ontario uses social media. These politicians have the greatest need to interact directly with individuals throughout their term of service because municipal councilors are expected to know the members of their ward far more intimately than federal, or even provincial, politicians. My study focuses on the use of Facebook because literature indicates that it is the most political social media platform and that it presents politicians with the greatest opportunity to foster political engagement online. Through analysis of the Facebook pages of Toronto city councilors this study examines the degree to which councilors use Facebook to engage their followers, whether certain citizens are consistently engaged in ongoing political discussions, and whether small communities of politically engaged citizens develop around the Facebook profiles of councilors.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Campbell

In the early days of the Internet, many political communication theorists held the utopian belief that political actors would use online tools to communicate directly with members of the public, and thereby bolster political engagement and enrich democracy. Unfortunately, studies over the past two decades found that political websites were not usually used to interact directly with the public, but instead were used to simply disseminate information in a one-way information-sharing model. However, the emergence of social media sites presents political actors with the opportunity to interact with the public far more easily than websites had previously allowed. Given the widespread adoption and high usage rates of social media sites, these online resources could potentially open up a space for public discussion about politics and allow political actors to interact directly with members of the public. Literature indicates that this type of shared space is conducive to the kind of civic mindset that leads to higher rates of political engagement. Research on political uses of social media tends to focus on the use of social media engagement. Research on political uses of social media tends to focus on the use of social media within elections, such as the 2008 U.S presidential election, and on the use of social media by national governments. I have chosen instead to examine how a group of municipal councilors in Toronto, Ontario uses social media. These politicians have the greatest need to interact directly with individuals throughout their term of service because municipal councilors are expected to know the members of their ward far more intimately than federal, or even provincial, politicians. My study focuses on the use of Facebook because literature indicates that it is the most political social media platform and that it presents politicians with the greatest opportunity to foster political engagement online. Through analysis of the Facebook pages of Toronto city councilors this study examines the degree to which councilors use Facebook to engage their followers, whether certain citizens are consistently engaged in ongoing political discussions, and whether small communities of politically engaged citizens develop around the Facebook profiles of councilors.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 211
Author(s):  
Philip Nyblom ◽  
Gaute Wangen ◽  
Vasileios Gkioulos

Social media are getting more and more ingrained into everybody’s lives. With people’s more substantial presence on social media, threat actors exploit the platforms and the information that people share there to deploy and execute various types of attacks. This paper focuses on the Norwegian population, exploring how people perceive risks arising from the use of social media, focusing on the analysis of specific indicators such as age, sexes and differences among the users of distinct social media platforms. For data collection, a questionnaire was structured and deployed towards the users of multiple social media platforms (total n = 329). The analysis compares risk perceptions of using the social media platforms Facebook (n = 288), Twitter (n = 134), Reddit (n = 189) and Snapchat (n = 267). Furthermore, the paper analyses the differences between the sexes and between the digital natives and non-natives. Our sample also includes sufferers of ID theft (n = 50). We analyse how account compromise occurs and how suffering ID theft changes behaviour and perception. The results show significant discrepancies in the risk perception among the social media platform users across the examined indicators, but also explicit variations on how this affects the associated usage patterns. Based on the results, we propose a generic risk ranking of social media platforms, activities, sharing and a threat model for SoMe users. The results show the lack of a unified perception of risk on social media, indicating the need for targeted security awareness enhancement mechanisms focusing on this topic.


Author(s):  
Mandakini Paruthi ◽  
Priyam Mendiratta ◽  
Gaurav Gupta

Social media has emerged as a dominant digital medium platform in contemporary society. The quick development of social media has instigated changes concerning the way publics to interact with a group of people with similar ideologies, the quality of information they share, or the opportunity to acquire and share ideas. Social media use has a major influence on public relations, marketing, and political communication. Therefore, politicians are formulating their strategies to reach increasingly networked individuals. The chapter defines political engagement concept, focuses on excessive use of social media to understand how the emergence of digital citizenship is changing political engagement. In addition to this, the chapter also examines whether the use of social media exercise any effect on 2014 and 2019. General elections outcome or not and discuss the proposed conceptual framework for future empirical testing. The chapter highlights the various concerns needed to be taken care of while using social media as a marketing tool for promoting political participation and engagement.


2014 ◽  
Vol 152 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Macnamara ◽  
Gail Kenning

Following the 2004 US presidential election campaign, which was described as ‘a critical turning point’ in use of social media, and particularly the 2008 Obama campaign, there has been increasing focus on use of social media for political campaigning and what is termed e-electioneering and e-democracy. However, studies of election campaigns between 2010 and 2012 in a number of countries have identified what Steve Woolgar (2002) calls cyberbole in relation to social media for political engagement. With substantive patterns of change in political communication yet to be identified, a quantitative and qualitative study of social media use in the 2013 Australian federal election campaign was conducted using the same methodology as studies of the 2007 and 2010 campaigns to gain comparative longitudinal data. This identified trends in the volume of e-electioneering and the ways in which social media are being used for political communication and democratic engagement.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-161
Author(s):  
Festy Rahma Hidayati

The presence of digital media, such as social media allows us to connect without any limitations of space and time. Consumption of social media brings changes in various aspects of life, including the habits of communicating and interacting in today's network society. In the political field, social media creates opportunities for political leaders to carry out political communication. As a strategic political communication channel, social media plays a role in receiving and responding to public aspirations. In fact, the use of social media for campaigns by political leaders shows a trend of increasing popularity and electability due to the influence of branding on social media. The use of social media by political leaders in building specific branding is at the core of this article. Political leaders optimize their personal social media accounts for political communication. The positive perception of the public allows for an increase in popularity and electability which brings to the national political stage. This article is a conceptual paper that analyzes the concept of branding in politics in the era of digital political communication by utilizing social media. The author uses relevant literature reviews from previous studies. This article reveals that several political leaders that have been studied have optimized social media to carry out political communication to their citizens. They display digital content to gain public support and trust, and display branding as a populist, professional, humanist, and responsible political leader.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Maghfira

Abstarknyo The development of communication technology has penetrated the lives of human beings. One form of communication is the development of new media technologies who gave birth to social media. Political world is also not free from the influence of new media and social media. Social media are like two sides of a coin for political actors. On the one hand, the success by using social media is getting positive support. But on the other hand failure by using social media is the risk by damaging the image. This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities of social media on political actors. Exposure to the use of social media in political communication becomes the first part of this paper. The second section discusses the challenges faced by political actors in the 2.0 era. The third section gives an offer opportunities for political actors in the utilization of social media. There is also the fourth and final section is a conclusion that contains what should be done by political actors to minimize the risks and maximize the opportunities offered by social media. Keywords: internet, new media, social media, political communication


2022 ◽  
pp. 917-930
Author(s):  
İbrahim Hatipoğlu ◽  
Mehmet Zahid Sobaci ◽  
Mehmet Fürkan Korkmaz

Today, politicians like other political actors use social media to interact with their audiences. In the relevant literature, studies on the use of social media by politicians focus more on how politicians use social media for political communication during the election periods and its impact on the election results. Furthermore, these studies mainly focus on national politicians. Few studies focus on the use of social media during a non-election period by the local politicians, and these studies analyse the purpose of using social media. Therefore, in the relevant literature, there is a need for empirical studies to measure the citizen engagement level of local politicians during the non-election period and analyse its determinants beyond the purpose of using social media. In this context, this study aims to analyse the relationship between some factors and the level of citizen engagement of the mayors on Twitter in Turkey. The findings of the analysis show that there is a relationship between the status of municipalities and the engagement level of mayors.


Author(s):  
Oktavianus Klau Lekik

Nowdays, social media has the potential to become a wave of information and opinion. Mass mobilization is now easier with social media, and of course the cost is very affordable and free. In addition, exposure to social media is very fast taking reactions from the public. If it is not done well, the legitimacy and reputation of a political figure can decline rapidly. Social media is able to provide the public with information both about politics and the capacity and credibility of the attitudes of political leaders, with the breadth of networks owned by social media, people can learn about politics from social media. In fact, social media facilitates the public to know the statements of the attitudes of political leaders regarding a particular discussion and can make the community become political literate. Thus, in general, social media is a trend that can be useful as a media for political campaigning, expressing cheap and effective political attitudes and political learning. This study, the authors focus on analyzing the Use of Social Media as a Form of Political Attitude in Indonesia, with the aim to be achieved by the author to find out, Firstly, this study is to understand the cultural context of political actors in using social media as a form of political attitudes to influence the final community recently on social media. Secondly, the desire to describe the ways political actors use social media to express their political attitudes and express themselves through social media to influence everyday people's behavior. Thirdly, in the form of political attitudes using cultural symbols both based on religion, ethnicity, streams or certain groups that have interests expressed by various political actors and other groups to provoke the public through social media. Using the review literature method is descriptive analytical. Analytical descriptive research can be used to analyze data and facts that occur about the use of social media as a form of political attitudes. The results and conclusions of this study that, the use of social media to express political attitudes by political leaders, both in speeches, influencing and provoking the public are very easily spread through social media. This must be responded to well by social media users to use reasoning to think positively in expressing their political attitudes through social media, by using an understanding of media literacy, information literacy and technology literacy which is basically a source of truth.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Suratno Suratno ◽  
Irwansyah Irwansyah ◽  
Niken Febrina Ernungtyas ◽  
Guntur Freddy Prisanto ◽  
Safira Hasna

Political candidates are actively using Facebook's social media as a political communication strategy, for which there is social interaction and interactive dialogues between the candidates and the public in  virtual space, where this is needed to influence public involvement in achieving their political missions. Therefore, the objective of this study is to describe the influence of the use of social media Facebook as a political communication strategy on the electability, effectiveness, and popularity of the candidates of the DPR RI members in 2019 legislative elections. The research used theories and concepts of political communication and the use of social media in political communication, using quantitative research methods and surveys of 30 Facebook user respondents and voters in the 2019 legislative elections. The results showed there was an impact of Facebook utilization on the electability by  16%, on effectiveness by  39.7%, and on the popularity of prospective members of the DPR RI in the 2019 legislative elections by  17.3%. Users can actively collect information and opinions using this site as a place of communication between themselves with the politicians or with fellow supporters. However, the use of Facebook is not the only effective political communication strategy, traditional media such as television, radio, billboards, stickers are still effective to reach the public who do not always use social media.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yearry Panji Setianto

This research in progress explores how political discussion on Indonesian Twittersphere could provide a genuine conversation on debates related to the upcoming 2019 national election in Indonesia. Taking the case of the presidential and parliamentary election in the upcoming April 2019, the author uses social media data on Twitter to investigate whether the discussions are heavily lean into digital public sphere or more dominated by political buzzer and bots. The author examines this by creating Twitter network maps based on hashtags related to the election. Modularity tests are employed to identify the extent of online community developed during the conversations. Most of the hashtags analyzed could attract hundreds of small communities, created mini-publics, which in turn shows the degree of willingness of the Indonesian social media users to participate in this practice of digital citizenship. Qualitative observations on the selection of the most significant actors within the network and the words they posted are employed to understand if the conversations were not led by either dominant political actors or political buzzers/bots, and thus, suggest the citizens’ genuine form of political communication. Despite the limitations of studying Twitter data, the author suggests that by taking a closer attention to how political conversation in non-English/Western political environment, this study might provide valuable insights on the development of genuine utilization of (and trust on) the social media platforms for political engagement.


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