Category Archives: social media

Media impact on politics

One fact makes the social media strong when it comes to the topic of politics, is how it changed Arabs from being with to against their government. This does not makes me agree with what Arabs doing today in their countries, in fact I disagree with all of it for the fact that what they did is wrong, actually it was wrong from the start, because it just produced more anger and hate. The issue that the Arabs facing is the impact of Social Media in which they see for example videos or words that produces anger without knowing why they are even doing this. For instance if we delve more into this topic you will find out that Arabs always throws their own issues to Americans meaning that “America is the problem with everything” so this makes it even worse, if someone fail his course then yeah it is “Americans”

How this have even took place at first? and how this idea of “Americans” came to Arabs? One answer is reading off the internet and not knowing what is the source’s point meaning that “bad people” or “bad Arabs” have used this social media to brainwash Arabs and make Americans the main issue of everything. Also to be more fair I am not leaving the other side, as an Arab I have faced a lot of bad Americans who treated me as “The bad Muslim” and I do not mind it is totally okay for me, in fact it made me more open and try fix their thoughts about “me” not anyone else. Social Media is not something we should ignore, but something we should pay attention to more so that bad people do not use it to drive our “good guys” from the right roads, to the bad, and turn them to “bad guys” and the examples can be seen everywhere.

Now let us turn back to what I have said at first, when I stated that “bad people” used the social media to do bad things and brainwash the good guys, here I mean the bad guys who came from the government itself this is what destroyed the Arab dream and turned “Arabs spring” to “Arabs hill”.

This is my opinion and my opinion does not mean I am with either side, I am just arguing questions have been asked through the last 4 years, this is not meant to be disrespectful, instead it is for education.

Social Media’s effect of the 2012 Election

So far, I have collected research about the effects social media had on the 2012 election. I found it interesting that before during the time of JFK many were dependent on the radio and news channels, but now we have gotten to the digital age where that is where we find most of our information about anything! I am going to blog about politics in this blogpost though!  Social media has had a HUGE impact on the presidential election because they have granted candidates the oppurtunity to connect with more people, in particular the younger age group (18-24.)  Obama won the 2012 election, and it’s important to look at who was using social media as a campain strategy. Obama used facebook and twitter. He has been a tweeter since mid 2008 and has tweeted a lot (10-20 times a day) in order to reach out to many voters. Romney also used facebook, and tweeted less frequently than Obama. Another thing to look at is how much each candidate spent as a campaign strategy using digital media. Obama sent 47 Million, while Romney spent 4.7 Million.

Public Opinion also shapes how the election will go. Public opinion can be a major impact on those who are undecided. I came across a model proposed by Lazerfeld and Kat, they believed that ”opinions are not formed from mass media, but through individual interactions with opinion leaders.”

There are also proposed stages in regards to public which actually make a lot of sense because of how fast opinions on the internet, social media to be more specific:

1) Public opinion evolves to an ordered state in which one opinion predominates (not to complete consensus)

2)agents are reluctant to change their opinions, and the distribution of the number of individuals opinions changes. (power law)

3)agents take external actions to express their opinions.

I didn’t mention this earlier, but its also important to know that in 2008, social media wasn’t booming as much as it was then as it was in 2012.