I find it very intriguing how social media plays a big role in politics today. Social media is where we get our news the fastest and because of the fast paced information filled platform it is shaping the way we as a society go about politics every day. For example, Twitter recently suspended 70 pro-Michael Bloomberg accounts for ‘platform manipulation’ According to Twitters rules and policies they define platform manipulation as, “using Twitter to engage in bulk, aggressive, or deceptive activity that misleads others and/or disrupts their experience.” Apparently Bloomberg has paid many people to tweet positive things about him that way he could spread his message and reach a bigger audience.
I find it interesting that he uses this method and in order to circumvent the issue he stated that he wants those that he pays to advertise for him to make it clear before they make these posts. It may not be the most effective technique as well because those that are advertising may not even vote for him. I also wonder when twitter created this policy and if it was in response to similar actions that have happened previously.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/22/21148516/twitter-suspends-mike-bloomberg-facebook-google-platform-manipulation
I agree that social media has become a very prominent factor in politics over the past decade. It allows for information to be seen by mass amounts of people with the click of a button at very minimal if no cost. The factor that gives it such an advantage over other forms of media is that basically everyone can access it. Anyone who has access to a device that can connect to the internet can use it at no cost. Therefore, its most significant advantage is its potential for a broad outreach. With this ability for extensive outreach, it can also be used for some wrong reasons like in the case with Mike Bloomberg, where he was accused of “platform manipulation” because there were seventy “pro-Bloomberg” accounts promoting him. In specific, “One of the strategies — deploying a large number of Twitter accounts to push out identical messages — has backfired. On Friday, Twitter began suspending 70 accounts posting pro-Bloomberg content in a pattern that violates company rules.” (LA Times). The way they are dealing with it is, they are trying to find out what accounts are paid to advertise vs. ones that are not. Therefore we can know the primary motivation of these accounts for putting out pro-Bloomberg news.
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-02-21/twitter-suspends-bloomberg-accounts
The social media platforms have become a major way to spread political ideas during campaigns. In the United Kingdom, Brexit was also heavily affected by the social media platform. The politicians use all the data from the social media platform to pinpoint their target voters. They also drop advertisements for those swinging voters. The rumor has said that the company that provided all these could data and calculation is the same one that helped Trump in his 2016 election. The movie Brexit: The Uncivil war has a very detailed description of this matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit:_The_Uncivil_War
This is unfortunately the way the future of politics is going to become as technology outpaces even the users of the most basic platforms. Now that media campaigns are made and broken through social media it opens up our political system to more technological abuse than ever before. Bloomberg is able to use platform manipulation confounded by the hundreds of millions spent on advertising to try and manipulate your idea of him as a Presidential candidate before you even heard his policies. I think Bloomberg is doing what he needs to do but it is not right to try and manipulate your voters from advertising money. This problem is similar to what Russia was doing in 2016 when they used twitter and facebook to manipulate public opinion on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, having a massive effect on peoples perspective. Russia was able to use twitter and facebook bots who imitated real people in order to give the effect that there is much deeper support for certain candidate or less support for others. Overall I believe that politics combining with social media will cause a lot of problems in the future because people believe they’re 2 different entities when they’re slowly becoming just 1.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/05/study-russia-cybersecurity-twitter-1353543