The Impact of Social Media on Political Changes

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The Impact of Social Media on Political Changes Student Name: Ching-Wen, Su Student ID: 100803613 Date: 04/09/2014 Course: CeDAS, PELP part 3 Word Count: 1,197 Introduction Since social media has launched, it has revolutionized the way we communicate; in the United State, where more than 60% of the population use social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and it seems become people’s one part of life (Metaxas & Mustafaraj, 2012). However, according to the cases of “Arab Spring” and “Jasmine Revolution”, the influence of social media is not restricted to our daily communication, but also have the huge impacts on political changes such as topple the governments or change the result of elections (Joseph, 2012). This essay will firstly explain the definition of social media and its feature; secondly, some cases will be illustrated to describe how social media influence political change. Finally, it will discuss how much effect social media has and whether it has revolutionized the world. It will focus on the effect of social media on politics. Definition At the Beginning, the term “social media” should be defined. According to Joseph (2012), social media is a publicly website or a social networking site, which is available for the groups, and the content is generated by the users. In fact, the influence of social media is beyond people’s expectation. Take Facebook for example, their 2012 initial public report shows that there are 845 million Facebook active users worldwide in 2012, which means it has the third largest population if Facebook were a country (Safranek, 2012, p.1). Therefore, the influnce of social media is huge and go deep into people’s life, they use these channel to do photo-sharing, instant message or blogging to communicate with others, a new personal interaction way had created and had become a sweeping trend

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