Social Media Affected by Politics

Social media is saturating the public news sphere with unreliable and inaccurate information, specifically regarding politics.

Social media allows us to view political news and participate in political discussion like never before.

At the same time, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms are so popular because they know what we already like. Cute cats? Pics of your bestie? A certain political viewpoint? No problem. Our social media feeds aren’t about helping us explore new things. They’re about creating a comfortable place to hang out. And it works.

Until it’s time to expand our worldview and explore all sides of an issue.

“One of the great things and one of the horrible things about social media is that everyone can have their say,” says Juana Summers, an editor for CNN Politics. “It’s kind of a marketplace for ideas. And some voices that sometimes are not correct or have a very partisan slant can oftentimes get amplified.

Living in a democracy means that all voices can be heard. But with the ability to curate our own news and limit the voices of those with opposing political views, we end up only hearing from people we agree with and completely missing out on anyone else’s opinion. Instead of embracing a vibrant public conversation, we end up in an online echo chamber.

INTRODUCTION

Twentieth century is said to be a media saturated society in which the range of information sources available to the citizens is much greater than at any previous time in history. Every day, people are making decisions regarding which information to pay attention to, ignore and avoid. In some spheres of life, these daily decisions have limited consequences while in others the repercussions may be greater. Out of these spheres the realm of politics is one in which the consequences may be wider-reaching.

An informed citizenry is believed to be essential to the effective functioning of democracy (Berelson. Lazarsfeld. & McPhee, 1954; Lippman, 1913), making the issue of where citizens obtain their political information a core factor in the health of a democracy (Jones, 2004; Vincent & Basil, 1997).  Australia, being a democratic country voting in government elections is compulsory, with fines for non-compliance. This means that informed or not, the clear majority of eligible citizens vote and in such an environment, the daily information choices Australians make regarding political information is of particular concern. Exclusive use of poorly researched, biased, or scandal- oriented political reporting, for example may result in uninformed or misinformed voting decisions which will have huge impact on the effectiveness of our democracy.

In most modern liberal democracies, the task of informing the population about political issues and events has been traditionally conducted by the media (Chadwick, 1998; Jones, 2005; Pinkleton & Austin, 2002; Ward. 2006). However, the assumed centrality of the mass media to the dissemination of political information warrants re-examination considering the rapid and continual development of new, digital communication technologies such as SMS, email and Web.

Digital and internet technologies are today blurring the traditional distinctions regarding the roles of creator, consumer and distributor of media and information products (Goggin, 2010). Technological convergence also increases the fluidity with which media consumption may occur, with multiple sources of media products available such as television, mobile phone, computer, internet connection.

The information landscape seems significantly broadened and complicated by the emergence of such digital communication technologies. Of particular concern is their capacity to narrowly tailor information exposure, fragmenting the public sphere an potentially eliminating the “shared public world” which the mass media once facilitated (Couldry & Markham, 2006, p.256). In such an environment, “the question of what information flows reach us and how we select from them becomes more-not less- urgent” (Couldry, 2002, p.27).

There is evidence that social media may lack credibility and reliability when used as a medium to obtain news content (Doctor, 2010). One of the factors affecting credibility is gatekeeping which could lead to the inability of social media to act as a reliable platform for news consumption. Gatekeeping occurs when people may filter content or frame content 8 The New News Media representing biases or conscious manipulation tactics (Phelan et al, 2009). Social media is especially vulnerable to this phenomenon as anyone is able to post information from any original source and may distribute it to other people in any form. This issue is based on the fact that citizen journalism occurs over social media, where users are in the position of both distributing and consuming information (Mythen, 2010). Gatekeeping could also lead to false information being disseminated over social media. Misinformation occurs when people disseminate inaccurate information unintentionally, whereas disinformation occurs when people disseminate false information on purpose (Mikelic et al, 2003).

Much of what we know as facts, and much of what are presented to us as facts, are more correctly characterized as “factoids” – a word believed coined by Norman Mailer – which has two closely related meanings:

1) a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print.

a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually or strictly true, or an invented fact either deliberately created or created by sloppy thinking, poor logic skills, lack of critical thinking or poor journalism believed to be true because it appears in print, in a journal article, in mainstream or social media, on a web site or has ‘gone viral’ on the Internet.

PROBLEM AND APPROACH

Australia is a geographically large nation with comparatively tiny population. This relatively low population density and dispersed distribution pattern results in the Australian media industry having a small market and high barriers to entry.

Let us base our assignment on casual observation that Australians in general seem fairly sceptical about the media. as it stands, social media is dangerously undermining political discussion and there is no denying the emancipatory power of social media.