Should Social Media Used for Political Campaigns?

1893 Words8 Pages
OVERVIEW The development of technology has changed patterns of interaction and communication among individuals. Many people use the internet to obtain information, discuss and share about some issues. In addition, most people are familiar with social media as media to interact or communicate with their friends, families, and colleagues’ today. Social media facilitates humans to distribute knowledge, experiences, ideas, and opinion among the users through electronic media such as Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and You Tube. (Stieglitz, Brockmann, & Dang-Xuan , 2012). Regarding the data in 2012, there are more than 900 million people who are members of the Facebook network and another social media is Twitter with more than 500 million people as users. (Forbes, 2012) The development of social media has increased significantly in many countries. Regarding the political sector, social media influences patterns of political communication. According to Mcnair, cited in Riaz, political communication is the purpose of communication about politics. It means that politicians communicate with their voters with verbal and non-verbal communication, verbal communication is written argument and non-verbal communication means visual appearance, such as clothes, hairstyle and logo designs. (Riaz, 2010) Today, many politicians or candidates use social media to obtain public support during campaigns and election times. It has enormous power because the internet has increased dramatically in young generations, especially for potential voters. They think social media has a real potential to disseminate messages quickly and across a wide area. Besides, they can reach the public easier than using traditional media, such as television, magazines, or newspapers. On the other hand, there are issues about the weakness of social media. Some people argue that social media will
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