Politicians and modern day media

Politicians+and+modern+day+media

Makanda Rolfe, Staff Writer - The Mustang Messenger

Our politicians today, while being viewed as a higher class and power, are much more informal in today’s media than we have ever known them to be before. Something you would have never seen in the past is something so casual and common in our modern media today. We have lots of different variations and reasonings for our political figures to be seen and perceived in certain ways on social media in order to gain popularity. To a certain extent we see the same from our political powers that we do from our friends on Facebook or Instagram. 

Almost every political figure that has a decent following has what’s known as a Social Media Manager. The point of these social media managers is commonly to get the younger generation in on politics by advertising them in such a way that the modern teenager is used to witnessing across different social media platforms. The most obvious recent instance of this tactic was Joe Biden’s Instagram post which was disguised as a “BeReal.” BeReal is a popular social media platform that took off in early 2022. BeReal has a different type of platform than other social media. The platform has a format where it takes a picture with both the front and back camera simultaneously. 

Biden’s Instagram account “POTUS” posted the picture on October 24th as a clever marketing tactic to promote vaccination. While the topic of vaccination is controversial and disagreed upon very often, this post did exactly what the social media manager intended. It got people talking about the current social situations. The intention of social media managers is to prompt anything and any way that they can. 

Another way social media programs play a different part in our modern-day influence is the fact that we now know and understand much more about our political figures. than we have in past centuries. For example, think about your favorite politician. You know their first and last name most likely but you probably know their kid’s name well, maybe even where they grew up or if their kids grew up in the same place. While we had knowledge of cities and residences of past political figures, their personal lives were usually kept more private unless unwillingly disclosed by a newspaper.

This may not always be a good thing, however. With the new social media influence as well as the growing age of technology and our standing on how it works, it can become dangerous much more easily than media could in the past. We now have things like doxxing, which is where you find an absurd amount of private information, including the person’s residency and publish it to the internet without the person’s prior knowledge. As well as doing, another negative aspect of having our modern-day politicians in the media is the ability for fake news to occur. While a lot of people try to look for reliable sources, some take what they see on the internet as a rule, no matter what they see it on. We have already seen multiple instances of fake news occurring in our political world. The most common of these occurrences is on Facebook. Facebook users are able to publish anything they like as long as it’s not discriminatory or inappropriate, and while it’s possible to report something as fake news, it commonly gets passed around as truth before the realization of it being inaccurate.

In conclusion, modern social media has had and will continue to have both positive and negative impacts on our political world. The media makes it much easier to retain news and does a good job of spreading news around in a more interesting way than just stating political facts and grasping a more engaging audience while also having the opportunity to display fake news.