The characteristics of new media due to its plasticity and interactivity as open and non-hierarchical participation have made social media attractive to many of its users. Social media and other forms of new media have both their merits and demerits in making the world more democratic. To some extent, the rise of social media has made the world more democratic as it is accessible to the common person and encourages political engagement. On the contrary, it has also made the world less democratic through its content and context, and together with the use of social media as a tool of propaganda and censorship. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The media has political significance in its role as the fourth estate in a liberal democracy to maintain checks and balances on government and facilitate public discourse, inform, and represent the public. Most mass media came with the development of new technologies in the 19th and 20th centuries that enabled mass communication. The development of new media such as social media has led to the facilitation of faster and more widespread information. Hague, Harrop and McCormick defined social media as an interactive online platform with designated recipients, which facilitates collective or individual communication for the exchange of user-generated content and connects mass and personal communication. Social media has been increasingly influential and its growth has been constant. unprecedented with the advent of technology. The accessibility of social media and its commercial availability have been important in immersing the common person in the inaccessible realm of politics. Jay Rosen described this notion of social media as “politically infused participatory media” (Tottier and Fuchs, 2015). This emerging notion has been fueled by the global adoption of social media by politicians, political activists and citizens as a means to engage, organize and communicate their opinions. The manifestation of world politics in social media can take many forms, from popular culture to memes to videos and satirical articles that may mislead readers. However, the creation of these products encourages citizens' democratic engagement in the creation and development of opinions in which individuals can defer, negotiate and accommodate power relations. These products can also create a common bond that binds an increasingly divided nation together, as Benedict Anderson has argued that the modern nation-state is best understood as an “imagined community” through the sense of cohesion felt by citizens of a modern nation who it was both artificial and facilitated by the mass media (Hull, 2017). The dynamics of media and politics can also alter, shape and structure the political process, public sphere, organizations, institutions and actors (Stromback and Esser, 2017). An example of this is the use of Twitter as an online platform for interaction during the 2011 Arab Spring to organize massive public demonstrations that led to the collapse of the Mubarak regime. The social and personal nature of politics means that the reflections of narratives, norms and values produced by society are reflected in the media consumed. In this sense, the accessibility of social media and its political content are intertwined and can become unconsciously political as politics and political subjectivity are interpreted and reconstituted by citizens. While democracy is complex and multifaceted, the rise of social media has made the world more cohesive. through the sense of shared and digitally democratic reality as Sidney supportedKraus and Dennis Davis, political reality is formed by mass communication accounts that are discussed, altered, and interpreted by citizens in society (Kraus and Davis, 1976). Furthermore, it can be argued that politics on social media is seen as a vital form of political participation. Media in democracies are characterized by a free flow of information through multiple open channels. However, this may not seem so democratic due to the presence of bias and the commercialization of social media. Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs theorized that social media is predominantly a phenomenon of state-corporate power in which powerful corporate and state interests are present and meet, evidenced by the existence of a surveillance-industrial complex that controls social media communication media and is made up of a collaboration of social media and Internet companies, secret services and private security companies. Politics in social media is intrinsically shaped by a resource factor such as visibility, attention, money, reputation, influence, and social relationships. Peter Dahlgren has argued that politics is increasingly organized as a media phenomenon, planned and executed for and with the cooperation of the media (Dahlgren, 2001). Therefore, bias is present and always has been in the media, in all online sources, and calls into question the form of objectivity towards the reader that can have a significant impact on politics. The term “filter bubble” was coined in 2010 by Eli Pariser to characterize an Internet phenomenon in which individuals receive only the type of information that they have pre-selected or that third parties have decided on. An example would be Facebook's newsfeed advertising which determines users' interests based on data collected from browsing and likes, to determine their demographic information and underlying political beliefs (Hull, 2017). This creates further problems such as confirmation bias which limits the ability to question information and tends to create polarized groups. In contrast, Chapman Rackaway argued that the effects of media bias are minimal (Rackaway, 2014). Another notable bias in all forms of media is the commercial bias where media content is sponsored by politically motivated groups, which can be caused by the poor source of funding. This is important to make the world more democratized as the media is increasingly becoming one of the dominant institutions in the public sphere and increasingly integrated into the realm of politics and society. The rise of social media has presented a platform for political communication. However, the democratization of this depends on the political system and the state's use of communication technologies to manipulate the media and the public. Within authoritarian regimes, media and public relations are tightly controlled with manipulated content, limited freedom of expression and limited media channels by the state. While traditional media are more easily controlled, authoritarian ideologies can infiltrate and persist in more progressive media (Khrisna-Hensel, 2018) through propaganda, which can take any shape and form to indoctrinate socially malleable masses, corrupt media organizations, selectively distributing advertising, manipulating media tax rates, and laws that facilitate the prosecution of independent and opposition journalists. The strict control of the Internet and social media has led to the emergence of inevitable new channels for the exchange of information and communications in the form of new social media networks, alternative press and media..
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