Social Media and Political Discourse in the United States

The internet has radically changed the political landscape in the United States, for politically active citizens, outside groups looking to influence elections and governance, and even politicians themselves. The many-to-many nature of the internet has greatly benefited political groups and candidates considered to be outside of the mainstream, as evidenced by the rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the 2016 election. These outsider candidates have been able to leverage the wide reach of social media in order to amplify their message and improve their electoral chances. Social media, and particularly Twitter, have become a necessity for all politicians over the last few years, with President Obama starting the first Twitter account for the President of the United States (@POTUS) in 2013.

Ultimately, this dependency on social media and the internet is both good and bad for political discourse. On the positive side, the internet provides near-instant access to all of the information a politically active citizen would need to inform themselves on the issues that are important to them. Unfortunately, the open nature of the internet also allows for lies and misinformation to seep into seemingly credible sources, meaning citizens can be misinformed, or even manipulated, easier than ever before. As such, it would be prudent for the United States to pursue some form of regulations to ensure that misinformation on the internet is kept to a minimum. A politically independent committee similar to those which ensure truth in advertising in Canada may be one solution to the problem. Overall, the use of the internet for political activity has provided plenty of new opportunities – both good and bad – for discussion and activism in the United States.

Before the internet was as widely used as it is today, political actors required more traditional means to spread their message. For most of the 20th century, television and print media were the mediums in which political actors relied upon to reach an audience. Print media, in the form of “newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, calendars, and [more]” was considered “the central vehicle by which activists on all points of the political spectrum … spread their opinions, elicited support, created networks among like-minded individuals, and attempted to establish cohesive group identities for the larger world.” (Schreiber, 2016, p. 1). This is very similar to what current political activists would hope to achieve over newer forms of media, with the notable exception that print publishers (and television broadcasters) have much more control over what is said over their platforms compared to what can be said over the internet. For example, a print publisher has the ability to pick and choose what gets published on their platform and will generally need to ensure that anything they’re publishing contains verified information. Contrast that with a social media network such as Twitter, where anyone can register for an account and post what they like. While Twitter has the ability to remove posts that violate its own rules, any information from a post can be viewed and shared before the social network actually manages to take the post down. As a result, political discussion has become saturated with all sorts of new information that may not have reached a broad audience before the internet. From a free speech point of view, this may be a good thing as it allows citizens – who otherwise may not have been able to reach a sizable audience – the chance to speak their mind and share their opinions. However, this also provides an opportunity for nefarious actors to spread lies and misinformation in the hopes of confusing or misleading the electorate.

In general, the internet has allowed us to surround ourselves with a constant flow of information which suits the narrative we want to see, even if it may not be true. This is one of the dangers of political activism reaching the internet; if people can pick the news that they want to digest and ignore the news that doesn’t tell them what they want to hear, they can create an echo chamber that simply reinforces their beliefs rather than informing them of what’s going on in the world. With 61% of millennials turning to social media for most of their news consumption, the potential for hyper-partisanship and misinformation from bad actors is an enormous problem for political discourse now and in the future.

The internet era has allowed for political groups and candidates outside of the mainstream to enjoy more success than ever before. As mentioned before, the popularity of outsider candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the 2016 election can be partially attributed to the wide reach of their subreddits, and for the latter, his Twitter account. For Sanders, his supporters on Reddit were able to raise at least $2.3 million for his campaign and helped broadcast his platform to the more than 200 million active users on the social media website. Pew Research found that Bernie Sanders was mentioned on Reddit more often than both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined in May, June, and September of 2015, largely due to his dedicated subreddit r/SandersForPresident. The fact that posts on the Sanders subreddit were some of the most liked posts on the entire website put them front and center for anyone visiting the site, helping to provide notoriety for an otherwise outsider candidate. The popularity of Sanders’ dedicated subreddit seemed to coincide with his rise in the polls for the Democratic nomination, as he went from a relative unknown polling at 5% support in mid-2015, to within about a point of Hillary Clinton one year later.

Sanders wasn’t the only outsider candidate in 2016 to benefit from Reddit’s platform, as Republican nominee and current President Donald Trump had a popular subreddit of his own. According to redditlist.com, his dedicated subreddit named “The_Donald” currently ranks third in terms of recent activity across the entire social network (Tracking the top 5000 subreddits, n.d.). Because of this constant stream of activity, like with the Bernie Sanders subreddit in 2016, Reddit posts that support the President and his agenda are often pushed to the front page for all users to see. Not only does this information reach most, if not all of the active users on Reddit, but it can also spread across multiple social networks fairly quickly. Due to the nature of social media, it’s incredibly easy to share content from one network to another and have it reach a new audience. In fact, the President himself (possibly with the help of his staff) has often used his Twitter account to amplify messages from websites that promote fringe ideas and ideologies, and shared them with his now more than 55 million followers. In late 2017, the President retweeted three videos posted by Jayda Fransen, the leader of a far-right group in Britain, depicting violent acts by Muslims for the purpose of promoting Islamophobia and supporting his own rhetoric. The move to retweet these videos was heavily condemned and eventually led to a retraction from Trump, but not before the message had been spread to his millions of followers and more. These fringe parties are able to reach a much larger audience than ever before with the help of influential people like the President of the United States spreading their views over social media. The internet has allowed for outsider candidates and fringe views to be amplified due to the many-to-many nature of social media; whether this is a good or bad thing likely depends on your own political views.

Social media and the internet have become a necessity for political parties over the last few years, with seemingly every candidate and politician having a Facebook page and Twitter account of their own. Political parties themselves have even created their own social media accounts in the hopes of spreading their party’s platform to a broader audience. Instead of having to rely on traditional forms of media to get their message across – which can be slow and unreliable as the medium ultimately has control over the message – the party can send out a tweet supporting one of their politicians or attacking a politician from a rival party, and in much less time than through traditional media. The same applies to politicians, as we regularly witnessed in the runup to the 2016 election with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and the Republican Donald Trump. The two regularly used Twitter as an avenue to attack their opponent, hoping to score points over the other and win votes through a rather unconventional manner. In June of 2016, Clinton replied to a barb from Trump about President Obama’s endorsement of her with a tweet telling him to “delete [his] account”. This tweet was the most retweeted tweet of the entire election cycle, with Trump’s reply to this tweet coming in second place. In a sense, this was almost like an extension of the three debates that the candidates would partake in before the election, but in more of a trivial setting and restricted to 280 characters per point. Nothing in these tweets was of much relevance to the election, or any of the important issues that voters would be expected to care about – the economy, immigration, health care, and so on – but the tweets above were still more popular than any tweets about those issues.

This helps reflect the shift in priorities for political candidates in the internet era; traditional debates are still very important for winning voters, particularly ones who stay off of social media, but there is clearly a lot of attention paid to winning over voters on social media as well. The attention seemingly goes both ways, as social media users, particularly those on Twitter, have shown a large interest in political content. 4 out of the top 10 most retweeted tweets of 2017 were inherently political, with 3 of them originating from President Barack Obama’s Twitter accounts, and the other from LeBron James referencing President Donald Trump. It’s easy to see why political parties would dedicate so much of their energy to social media; not only do most Americans frequent social media on a regular basis, but there is also quite an appetite for political content on these platforms. In the internet era, participating in social media has become as much a part of the job for candidates and elected officials as campaigning, debating, and so on. Social media is now an integral part of politics for both parties and candidates.

The shift towards social media as an outlet for political discourse has its positives, but also some potentially dangerous negatives. The fact that political figures can reach their supporters in an easier, more intimate fashion via social media is a big plus, as well as the opportunity social media provides for like-minded politically active citizens to engage with one another and discuss their opinions. These benefits help to cultivate an environment which could, in theory, grant people the ability to find all the information they need to become politically informed, and with very little difficulty. Obviously, this isn’t quite a reality just yet due to the ease in which fake news can be created and spread across the internet. This, combined with the tendency for people to seek out opinions close to their own rather than objective truths, is one of the biggest negatives with regards to social media and the internet.

This tendency to seek what we want to see has allowed for nefarious actors to use social media to promote their own interests by spreading misinformation. Once again, the 2016 election provides a key example of how bad actors could shape the narratives around political candidates by using social media to theiradvantage. Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm used by the Trump campaign, was able to extract data on 87 million Facebook users through a third-party application. The data harvested from this application provided the Trump campaign with useful demographic information that would theoretically allow them to deliver targeted ads to specific groups of people that would respond positively to the ads. The ease in which fake news can be created and spread makes this data even more useful. If you’re part of a political campaign and you know that voters will be more likely to vote for you – or less likely to vote for your opponent – if they see certain news stories, why not just create your own to suit that narrative? This is an incredibly dangerous loophole that political campaigns could exploit in order to win elections, and it should be viewed as a serious threat to democracy. Not only that, but a government currently in power could use fake news as a means to remain in power by manufacturing stories that paint them in a positive light. Additionally, these stories could be used to justify actions that defy democratic norms such as jailing or murdering political opponents, restricting voter rights, and other tyrannical behaviours. These dangers have always existed (tyrannical governments rising to power are not a new phenomenon) but the internet provides a new avenue for these governments to exploit the naivete of certain blocks of voters. While the internet has created new ways for political actors to interact with voters, the potential for data breaches and the exploitation of fake news are critical issues that need to be solved as soon as possible.

As of now, the United States does not enforce any sort of law that prevents misinformation from being spread in political ads. Without context this may sound unintuitive, but the United States has always been a country that prioritizes the First Amendment, which essentially protects its citizens’ right to freedom of speech and various other forms of expression. In 2014, a federal judge struck down an attempt to police truth in political campaigns in the name of protecting the First Amendment. Allowing the government to determine what is true and what is not creates a similar problem as not policing it at all in the era of fake news. Both extremes provide an ill-meaning government a method for twisting reality for their own benefit, so neither option seems like an appropriate way to handle the issue. However, ignoring it entirely is not an answer either, as the 2016 election has shown that a political candidate can get away with lying with little repercussion. News media is likely hesitant to push back on suspect claims in fear of being accused of favouritism, and social media platforms refuse to censor accounts unless they’re in clear violation of the platform’s rules. It’s hard to see a clear solution that doesn’t infringe on the First Amendment right of Americans and that doesn’t provide the government with too much power to censor speech, but perhaps an independent fact-checking organization would be of some use. A good example of this idea can be found in PolitiFact, although they have no real power to force politicians to tell the truth unless most Americans trust and believe what they’re saying. Perhaps an election law similar to the one in Canada, stating that “no person shall, with the intention of affecting the results of an election, knowingly make … any false statement of fact in relation to … a candidate”, would be appropriate in the United States. This is far from a solution to the growing threat of fake news from sources other than political candidates, but at the very least, it would help curb the ability for political actors to share these fake news stories with little to no repercussion. There does not seem to be an easy answer for combating fake news, nor the larger issue of lying in general in politics, but the current system and its lack of regulations has not worked.

The internet has provided sweeping changes for political discourse in the United States, from the way that political actors engage with citizens, to new challenges that will test the strength of American democracy. With the help of the internet, outsider candidates that may have struggled to grab the attention of voters now have a relatively easy method to reach and interact with them. The rise of social media has allowed for like-minded people to congregate and find others who share their viewpoints, but this comes with its downfalls as it discourages these people from seeking opinions that differ from their own. The ease in which fake news can be produced and spread across the internet exacerbates this problem, as fake stories can circulate within these communities and mislead people who rely on these channels for their news. With this comes the possibility of bad actors exploiting fake news and echo chambers for their own political gain. There are no easy solutions to this problem that wouldn’t infringe on free speech, though an independent fact-checking organization may be able to limit the effectiveness of fake news. Social media and the internet have provided many exciting new opportunities for political activism, and drastically altered the way that political actors communicate with one another, but the threats to democracy that have emerged are issues that need to be dealt with as soon as possible.

Bibliography

Schreiber, R. (2016). Modern Print Activism in the United States. Place of publication not identified: Routledge.