Given its ease and reach, social media is a powerful tool for those with political interests, allowing for the easy creation of a platform for any opinion while adding more followers of an ideology with every increase in reach. This incentive propels social media page owners to follow s[pecific tactics to increase their page’s reach- usually by creating quick and easy to consume content to get as many people to follow and interact with the page as possible. Given the limited attention span it works on, most pages choose to use quick bursts of emotionally inciting or sensational writing to appeal to viewers. But how does this actually play out?
Let’s analyze some of these methods.
We’ll first talk about quotations.
As a result of inherent authority bias, writers appeal to old, popular, dead leaders to sound like they are making an argument that makes sense when they do not have any analysis to provide for it.
This tactic is often misused to criticize things that aren't even related to the quote. Misquoting(or rather quoting out of context) can set dangerous standards for people who follow and idolize these leaders without looking at the underlying context behind the quote.
An often-used example is this MLK quote.
"One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means." - Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
This is often used as a criticism of violent movements and actions by protestors and is used as a weapon to bring criticism to protests which do not follow Government orders trying to crack down on protest.
Ironically, the quote was never about protests but actually said in criticism to America going to war with Vietnam.
When you see a quote in a social media post, it often loses the context it was said in and will be misused to make you think otherwise. Quotations serve as a simple example of using something culturally(and thus emotionally) significant to push an ideology.
Some writing on Twitter tries to be more emotionally endearing as well. Here are some examples :
The use of the words "incredibly fast" and "spectacularly dangerous" don't have any inherent meaning. They're simply words meant to scare you and become alarmed at the state of things without being explanatory of anything. This kind of writing can have claims that carry no meaning themselves, with their worst kinds being simple quips at political opposition with no real scope for discourse or push for ideology.
An extension of this dramatic writing is the use of specific terms and phrases which most readers would not have studied or read about but usually have an opinion on as a result of conditioning in the status quo. Cultural conditioning often makes us believe that certain things are inherently good or bad without any logical reasoning.
An example of this is the word socialism in the US. Many readers do not know what socialism is, but often associate it with Russia(which was not socialist) and Nazis(which was far from socialist). This was a result of the long Cold War with Russia and the Holocaust which led to the perpetuation of the idea that socialism is an inherently bad thing and hence anything associated with socialism is bad (even if it has no relevance).
Notice how these posts and videos are very dramatic and implicit in their wording. They mark specific words with negative connotations without providing further reasoning behind them. In this case, readers who read this can become convinced they know why communism is bad without knowing anything about communism. Playing off of an already established cultural stereotype acts as a sort of two-pronged solution, where a page resonates with individuals looking to find their group represented on social media while those who didn’t study these things and are now emotionally invested enough to agree with one’s ideology because the posts play off of cultural conditioning.
We should focus on the large group of people who we can safely presume don’t know about political ideologies and policy approaches by each representative- what do they get out of this intense emotional focus in politics?
We can recognize that because of how easily accessible social media is, it is the easiest source of access to politics for this group as well. But when social media is filled with echo chambers, misinformation, emotional quips, and meaningless arguments, it ends up harming the democratic system for the worse. The most accessible form of political knowledge is no longer a knowledge base but a place for insults and more intolerance. As a result of adhering to algorithms, content creators for social media pages no longer resort to informing potential voters of their stakes in the system- resulting in the content we see today, made for the short attention spanned and easy-to-convince reader.
As a result, we end up with a poorly informed group of voters who are unlikely to be convinced to change their minds because of how emotionally invested their information is. It’s more difficult to break entire cultural and emotional schemas than logical arguments, making it harder to have any sort of political discussion or well-informed public.
But what is the solution to fight back against the algorithm while also providing for useful discussion? There are plenty of pages that try their best to balance their content under the algorithm, keeping it less sensationalist(albeit still existing) while also creating fun, interactable content to get pushed by the algorithm. Some social media sites and forums have risen for providing ‘uncensored, unmangled’ political discourse amongst peers to reduce the need to rely on the algorithm to get one’s point across and rather create an entire platform to suit the purpose.
There isn’t a lot of data for these solutions yet, but it does show us that it is possible to use alternative technologies to bring people together to perform viable discourse and that plenty of approaches exist to test their viability. We could say it is only a matter of time before a new platform hits that may finally solve the issues of the political social media pages of today.
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