Abstract: This paper discusses the increasing involvement of social media in the political process and the changes over time. Social media is often sighted as a source of misinformation and potential manipulation. Research in the area has had to adapt and change to determine the best way to analyse the modern environment, and has highlighted ways that the created networks can be both strengthened or undermined. Looking forward there are signs that what could be considered weak network relationships are able to be resilient rather than fragile and strengthen the democratic process.

 

Social media on the internet is virtually inescapable and easy for people to participate in. Large and Small communities all have voices across a variety of Social Media platforms that take only a click or a tap to join. These communities are held together with a perceived sense of belonging and common interests. Some of these common interests may be viewpoints on political and social issues, and the community will express a desire to raise broader awareness or pursue change in wider society. The community can respond to events such as natural disasters, armed conflicts, or other crises with support. The low barrier to entry can enable online advocacy, raising awareness and bringing issues into the spotlight. An area that social media involvement could have a large impact on is the engagement of citizens in the political process of a democracy. While modern democracy should involve all citizens, they may not be involved or even well informed of what is happening in the political sphere of where they live. Are social media platforms even a valid place for political involvement given the awareness of potential manipulation, leading fragile or problematic political engagement, and is the situation changing as the first generations of digital natives become more statistically significant in society?

Influencing via social media has been studied and analyzed so that the desired results can be achieved by whoever is attempting change a political landscape(Neumann et al, 2021). The desired narrative can be amplified using different techniques such as bots and false accounts in a coordinated way.  This can be used by parties that are pursuing both positive and negative agendas, however examples of negative agendas can provide a better insight to the methods that the influence is achieved through. Patterns of highly similar tweets emerged after the 2020 US Presidential election that presented as the start of grassroots movements designed to make people question the reliability of the US electoral system. This is an extreme example of the non-transparent propaganda that social media is able to spread which can influence people through an agenda-driven narrative. This propaganda is started from accounts that are made to look the same as every day, normal people, that overtime slowly build an audience that can be susceptible to manipulative narratives. Through the use of multiple coordinated accounts leveraging and exploiting individual and social biases that anchor in people’s minds through repetition, actors use a guise of authority and knowledge coupled with emotions such as fear to achieve belief in seemingly ridiculous claims by otherwise sensible, logical people. When this is coupled with the feedback loop of social media stories being reported by traditional mainstream media fueling more social media engagement, issues can be made to appear more important and many can be drawn into participation, influenced by the media framing of issues. This is normally viewed negatively. The spread of misinformation or fake news serves to undermine the positive effects that can be gained through social media use. If the United States is used as an example where the majority of adults use Facebook as a news source, and the platform has a history of false stories being shared, there is doubt raised that the benefits outweigh the risks of relying on social media to influence viewpoints (Jha et al, 2020). The reluctance and refusal of Facebook to address the question of fake news in the 2016 election potentially had a substantial impact on the result that saw Donald Trump succeed over Hilary Clinton. Confidence in the fair result of elections can become compromised by misinformation campaigns, lowering trust in democratic institutions (Hunter, 2023). This is often associated with lower political tolerance and polarization, and civic disengagement or to the extremes of political violence. The balance between allowing the freedom for people to post information online and the requirement for reliability of facts presented is a difficult task that civil society needs to constantly monitor and maintain, and could be considered a fragile state.

The impacts of social media on democracy can be shown as both positive and negative (Hunter, 2023). A democracy can be strengthened by social media just as much as it can be weakened by it, depending on the content that exists on the platforms that is consumed by the population. Hunter generalizes that the more diverse viewpoints that are represented and consumed by more of the population, along with political campaigns that communicate via social media result in an environment for a stronger democracy with tolerance and engagement in civil society. Conversely when the population experiences disinformation and polarization in online communities, the democratic process is eroded with norms such as tolerance, acceptance and transparency falling victim. The building of participation through strategic information operations has been used to achieve positive outcomes such as higher involvement in the political process, such as the use of social media by the Obama Presidential Campaigns. Both the 2008 and 2012 increase the involvement by not only encouraging supporters to listen to speeches, but sharing what they were experiencing (Gupta-Carlson, 2016). Through the use of “two-way tales” the campaign extended the traditions of call and response which have been successfully employed by community organizers such as Obama. Where previously these interactions would have had a limited ability to spread considering a digital story was expensive and complex to produce, leaving them restricted to word of mouth interactions, the twenty-first century has reduced the barrier to entry with inexpensive devices able to connect people to social media to participate in the exchange of stories without the limits of proximity to one and another. It could be reasoned that although political involvement through social media could be fragile a vulnerable to attack by misinformation, it is strengthen when there is inclusive discussion generated as content.

Questions around how to accurately measure online political participation correctly on social media do need to be taken accounted for. There are existing definitions such as passive and expressive behaviors online that can create discrepancies in the measurement of the effects social media has (Ruess et al, 2021). The platform specific nature differences in behavior cause difficulties in objectively quantifying participation and the concept of participation is itself always evolving, now to include the seemingly passive actions such as just consuming news over social media along with the more overt content creative actions. While there has been a decline in recent years in traditional political participation, engagement that requires a lower input of time, effort and finances is developing over social media. These have been dismissed as being only expressive or passive and not worthy of consideration as valid acts of participation, however they are overtime generating engagement that is shaping communication between political parties and the people they represent. Understanding the complicated nature of this engagement helps to determine if the engagement is solid and longstanding, or prone to loss of interest.

To begin to measure the effect of social media usage on participation and engagement, Shelley Boulianne performed a metadata analysis of 36 studies into this relationship (Boulianne, 2015). This encompassed the events the 2008 and 2012 Obama Presidential campaign periods and focused on the ties to political or activist organizations and associated online groups. This analysis attempted to uncover if there are broad reaching effects from social media across groups of people in different democratic and political systems. The metadata analysis is able to expose the way participation evolved over time and if the effects change year by year, and the nature of meta-analysis provides a better indication of causality. Through focusing on the larger social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, intricacies of the platforms themselves was negated in the studies. The data was relatively recent at the time of publication with only four of the included studies being from prior to 2008. The overall outcome from Boulianne’s analysis suggests that the relationship exists between social media usage and the engagement of people in political activities in a positive direction. However, the author states that the results are not definitive in showing that the effects are transformative due to the lack of statistically significant coefficients, with only half of the results reaching that level. The author mentions the potential that there are transformative effects within random samples of youth, yet that could also be explained by the higher, more intense usage of this group when it comes to social media. The conclusion questions the use of the Obama campaigns as an example of social media actually affecting the participation level of supporters, despite the then revolutionary employment of social media in the gathering of donations online and the two-way story telling employed to attempt to drive engagement. To gain further insight to the question of the effectiveness of social media in engagement a mixed method approach is suggested by Boulianne to encompass both involvement in online groups and analysis of the content created by the groups. This work was conducted on data which was generated by only the earliest of digital natives, and while social media and it use was undergoing significant development and change.

As social media develops and changes its impact on society should change. Given that the internet has rapidly grown over the start of this century, earlier studies may have struggled to find statistically significant correlations due to lower usage rates, but over time these correlations can grow to become significant. Jha and Kodila-Tedika in their 2020 paper “Does social media promote democracy? Some empirical evidence” utilized Facebook as a typical social media platform to attempt to establish a meaningful correlation between social media and the health of a democratic society (Jha etal,2020). They were able to demonstrate the strong correlation between democracy and greater Facebook penetration, and the impact was greater in lower income countries. They found that internet penetration was not an impact on democracy, but social media usage was. The authors highlighted several implications of their results. Developing countries can stand to gain significantly by investing in connectivity to internet resources especially for the lower to middle income sections of their society. This coupled with freedom to express their opinions in a way that is not subject to censorship is suggested as critical to functioning democratic society. The ability to be exposed to a range of different viewpoints which may challenge people’s existing ideas is a key aspect of a free and open social media environment. Restrictions through censorship of democratic institutions is potentially under threat in many locations including the United Kingdom and the United State, which could be problematic as they are leading sources of news. This could introduce higher fragility to the engagement of people in politics, impacting the motivation of people to remain engaged over time.

Motivation of a population to participate in political endeavors has been shown to be dependent on the style of digital interactions they engage in. The nature of many social media platforms that incorporate a news feed style of content that pushes information at the user can utilize personalization and narrow targeting makes for a more effective means of influence (Ohme, 2017). This is despite the weaker links that exist in an online network compared to the stronger links in a more traditional group-based environment when considering the view of citizenship. The weakness of the links created potentially allows for the perception by participants that they play a more central role in the network and the individualism is actually a strength that drives the involvement and motivation in political and civic matters. While the participants may view themselves as the center of the network, there is also a sense of collective power that is gained from the involvement in the network. As long as these ties are not undermined by manipulation or restriction, there should be nothing stopping social media being the primary source of engagement in politics for digital natives.

          As a course of action into the future, the freedom of people to engage in constructive conversations and consumption of unbiased, unmanipulated viewpoints on social media can provide not only a new means of political involvement, but a more participatory valid means of involvement. Maintaining the constructive and inclusive content on social media provides strength to the potential weak links in the network, and as the generations of digital natives become the majority of the population, research will help to understand the complicated nature of the relationships involved, and help to identify where undesirable manipulation is being employed.

 

References

Boulianne, S. (2015). Social media use and participation: a meta-analysis of current research. Information, Communication & Society, 18(5), 524–538. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1008542

 

Chandan Kumar Jha, Oasis Kodila-Tedika, Does social media promote democracy? Some empirical evidence, Journal of Policy Modeling, Volume 42, Issue 2, 2020, Pages 271-290, ISSN 0161-8938, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpolmod.2019.05.010

 

Gupta-Carlson, H. (2016). Re-Imagining the Nation: Storytelling and Social Media in the Obama Campaigns. PS, Political Science & Politics, 49(1), 71-75. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096515001274

 

Hunter, L. Y. (2023). Social media, disinformation, and democracy: how different types of social media usage affect democracy cross-nationally. Democratization, 30(6), 1040–1072. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2023.2208355

 

Ohme, J. (2019). Updating citizenship? The effects of digital media use on citizenship understanding and political participation. Information, Communication & Society, 22(13), 1903–1928. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1469657

 

Ruess, C., Hoffmann, C. P., Boulianne, S., & Heger, K. (2023). Online political participation: the evolution of a concept. Information, Communication & Society, 26(8), 1495–1512. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.2013919