The Pew Research Center has published an analytical report on the use of Social Media among US politicians and lawmakers in Congress. Of course, nobody overcame President Donald Trump in his frequent use of the Twitter platform, which history will remember as an exceptional case that will be studied in sociology and media studies, by an extraordinary American president in a sensitive and exceptional period in the history of the American state.
The report revealed that Democratic and Republican congressmen are more involved in "Social Media" platforms than ever before. The analysis is based on a database containing every Twitter Tweet and Facebook post for members of Congress since 2015. The report reflects that the US legislative landscape has undergone profound changes in recent years.
The clearest example of the standing that networking platforms have acquired occurred in the weeks following the killing of George Floyd, the black man who was killed as a result of excessive violence during his arrest last May.
The murder of Floyd has shaken the entire United States and sparked protests and civil disobedience. Communication platforms played an important role in coordinating protests and detonating them outside America, in Europe and Britain in particular. It has also played a more fundamental role in the communication process between politicians and their voters during protests than ever before.
According to the report, between May 25 and June 14, the phrase "black lives matter" and its hashtag from members of Congress at its current session on Facebook and Twitter mentioned more than all the contributions of all members of Congress in the past five years.
236 members of Congress mentioned the phrase "black lives matter" on Facebook and Twitter since January 1, 2015, which is the beginning of the analysis period. Of the mentioned number, 121 lawmakers mentioned that phrase for the first time in the three weeks following Floyd’s death.
These changes are especially monitored on Twitter, where any legislator has nearly twice tweeted today than it was in the summer of 2016. Congressional singers have three times their followers today compared to previous years after 2015, and they receive more than six times their tweets on each post today. Compared to the years of the beginning of the monitoring period.
The Democratic lawmaker has 17,000 followers on Twitter than his Republican counterpart, and the Democrat tweets the weakness of his Republican counterpart, a trend that has increased dramatically in the past four years, that is, since President Trump entered the White House.
While the Democrat is more active than the Republican on “Twitter” and “Facebook”, in the period between January and May 2020, the Republican legislator had a much greater interaction through the reactions of the followers to the posts and tweets and his return.
In Arabic: If George Floyd had been killed in any of the past 30 years, no one would have turned to him, even if a camera had been shot by a news channel, but when a camera shot him a phone and traded on the communication platforms, America turned upside down. It is true that Social Media generally abolished secrecy in our lives, exposed wrong practices and brought the politician closer to his audience, but it is still the first and best way to distort the facts for the sole reason that it is until today without clear criteria.
Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com
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