The Future of Social Media in Political Communication

Abstract

Social media technologies are revolutionizing the way political communication takes place in the United States. By increasing the speed with which information travels, social media plays a significant role in shaping political discourse. This is even more true when it comes to establishing the political agenda and shaping political discussion. While there are numerous ways social media performs these functions, press coverage also plays a role. Press coverage both enhances and diminishes this agenda-setting function. Social media and a reliance on traditional news media organizations for information are co-evolving in ways that are important toward understanding why and how information and news are accessed, shared, and spread via social media and news media sources.Social media's transformational role in the political communication of constituents has happened at a rapid pace. In terms of political communication, social media helps politicians, candidates, elected officials, interest groups, and news organizations to spread political information as well as foster interpersonal and group communication with and between people who care about politics (A Ayankoya, 2013). From the formulation of new laws to deliberately spreading propaganda, every area of politics is touched by social media's effects. This social media explosion generates vast and diverse streams of public political data. As the volume and variety of social media data proliferate, so do the methods of capturing, measuring, and modeling people’s reactions. The accelerated generation of data about public political responses offers researchers unparalleled opportunities to study a wide array of political phenomena, while also presenting serious methodological challenges regarding how best to collect, process, and analyze these data. Social media is a very new concept, despite its continued rapid growth, with only a few years of research available to scientific communities; therefore, building common methodologies and findings has lagged far behind (Billings, 2017). A broader understanding of this newly evolving political-communication paradigm is considered urgent. How the public sphere is changed remains a theoretical and practical challenge.

Keywords: social media, political communication, agenda-setting, information dissemination, political discourse, data analysis, methodological challenges.