NDM Story #21 - In the new robopolitics, social media has left newspapers for dead

In the new robopolitics, social media has left newspapers for dead

Summary:

This article suggests that the campaigners for Brexit and Donald Trump elections made deliberate efforts to attempt to manipulate the public by using social media in order to promote their own campaigns. This, in turn, suggests that these people in power are aware of the impact that social media has on the modern people of today and have exploited these platforms as opposed to using traditional media platforms to broadcast their message and promote their viewpoints. As a result of this, we can see that these people have hegemonic control because they've made a conscious decision to affect the audiences opinions who are freely allowing for this to happen.

•Originally we were going to spend £5-10m on [newspaper] advertising.

This statistic shows that initially the brexit campaign wasn't entirely aware of what positive impacts could arise as a result of advertising the campaign online as opposed to on traditional media outlets such as newspaper and television.
This has been described, by the writer of this article, as being a "robo-campaign". The people working for the campaign even set up practise test tweets and messages to see what the effectiveness of this method of persuasion would turn out like. This shows that there was a clear reason behind the new method and it was very strategically planned when it was being used.

My personal opinion:

I think that this is an interesting article and something I had not previously considered before, with regards to the two elections. However, this article reinforces the view that "bad publicity is still publicity" since they claim that Trump received free publicity whilst being controversial and "outrageous". This therefore presents manipulation techniques to take advantage of the public and also the journalists who still choose to write news. At the very end of this article, the journalist claims that "The populist revolutions of 2016 were caused by inequality and a corresponding sense of anger and worthlessness, not by the media. But understanding the precarious state of the media does help us understand the “post-fact” populist form they have taken," which I don't agree with.  I most definitely think that the media had a huge role to play in influencing people since a lot of people are passive readers of the news. It is evident that most people did not vote and this shows that people were heavily influenced and reliant on social media to inform them of who to vote for. Therefore I disagree with this final statement.

On a side note, I find it interesting how the journalist for this particular article has put his name in the same size as the title of the article because this would usually be smaller. This shows, in my opinion, a level of offence by the journalist which could explain his final biased opinion towards the end of the article, showing that he wants more recognition for his own work, as a journalist. The link also says "traditional media dead" which shows that although the journalist would obviously not be too happy about this, he is aware of this fact.