Description
Media and politics: Usage of Twitter as a political tool in enhancing democracy.
By
Anthony Kiptum Komen
Department of mass communication
Kabarak university.
Email: akomen@kabarak.ac.ke
Tel: +254798788178/0100322386.
Abstract
The advent of digital technology that uses the internet ushered in the new media that revolutionized communication as a whole. However, it led to other digital forms of communication such as social media like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and email among other uses of internet-enabled communication. The rise in social media users to four billion around the world (Auxier.B.& Anderson M, 2021), has impacted society enormously.
Although Facebook is also a widely used form of social media, scholars like (Robinson. R,2020,) argued that Twitter is among the most used social media sites for political communication. This social media site has substantially impacted political communication and democracy due to its nature and mode of communication. This research paper seeks to analyze, make observations and draw conclusions on why democracy in political communication has proliferated with the usage of social media, Twitter being the case study.
Through the analysis of previous descriptive research done on new media and politics, academic journals, and surveys, this paper tends to conclude that usage of Twitter as a tool for political communication enhances democracy. The problem statement of this research is cardinal to both politics and media since, media is used as an agenda-setting tool in politics to shaping people’s way of thinking (De Albuquerque A, 2019) . Once democracy is upraised in media, there is positive progressive social change in the society (Street J, 2010).
References
Robinson, R. (2020). The 7 top social media sites you need to care about in 2020. Adobe Spark [viitattu 27.10. 2020]. Saatavissa: . adobe. com/make/learn/topsocial-.
Auxier, B., & Anderson, M. (2021). Social media use in 2021. Pew Research Center.
Street, J. (2010).
