Politicians Connect to Social Media Networks
In the upcoming 2016 presidential election, political candidates are using more social networks to try to reach out to the millennial generation. Politicians’ campaigns include Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and other live-streaming apps. Politicians are trying to advertise to more of the millennials and generation Z, the newest round of registered voters who frequent these social media apps. The articles discusses Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy on social media as a prime example. Clinton has accounts on more “niche social networks” such as Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, and Spotify. These accounts are meant to humanize Clinton and to create an image of a well-rounded presidential candidate that her followers can relate to. For social media apps that Clinton and other politicians create accounts on, one can make a graph where nodes are a person’s account and edges are being a friend or follower of each other’s account. For example, one could create a large social network using Facebook friends as nodes and their friendship as edges. These graphs can easily illustrate mutual friendships between nodes. Political candidates such as Clinton wish to connect their accounts, or nodes, to these networks of other nodes in order to better campaign to them.
The author writes that “it remains to be seen how exactly how these efforts will influence voters and affect who becomes the next president of the United States.” I agree with this statement because I believe that social media apps can give a false representation of true friends, or in this case, true votes. A common misconception is that a node (a person’s account) is popular and has many friends based on the number of edges (or “friends”) connected to that node. Candidates must not assume that all edges are equal. They must take into consideration the strength or weakness of their ties to friends. A strong tie could be a node (or account) that displays a lot of activity connected to the candidate’s political platform, while a weak tie could be a node (or account) that does not have a true interest in politics or voting. I believe that in order for these social media campaigning efforts to successfully influence voters, the politicians must be more than a node with strong ties to other nodes in a network. The politicians must aim to somehow transform into a strong edge that connects other nodes, or voters. The nodes/voters would have a strong edge based on their mutual political interest in the candidate.