This past Tuesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren posted a video on Facebook Live at 10:52 pm EST. The video portrayed her standing outside the Senate chamber reading a letter written by Coretta Scott King after she was silenced from speaking by Republicans who invoked Rule 19. Remarkably just a few overnight hours later, the Facebook Live post had received over 5 million views and coverage from every major news outlet, and #LetLizSpeak and #ShePersisted trended on Twitter.
Sen. Warren’s Facebook post has now grown to over 11 million views and the attention has catapulted her into the political spotlight. In 2016, then candidate Donald Trump used Twitter as a rallying cry for those disenfranchised with American politics and he too leveraged the power of social media. Now as President, his continued use of social media has new ramifications when a company’s stock price can rise and fall based on his 140 characters.
Kelsey Clark noted in an article for the Huffington Post in 2016: “Budget proposals, campaign promises and personalities are now filtered through one-sentence tweets and 15-second Snapchat stories. Campaigns are ended and reputations slandered with a single Facebook post. Entire news cycles subsist on the ebb and flow of any one candidate’s Twitter feed.”
Social media played a key role in feeding the Women’s March on Washington. After the presidential election, retired attorney and grandmother, Teresa Shook, created a Facebook event page calling for a march on Washington after Trump’s inauguration. Before she went to bed, she had about 40 responses. When she woke up, she had more than 10,000. A few weeks later, an estimated 2.6 million people took part in 673 marches in all 50 states and 32 countries, from Belarus to New Zealand — with the largest taking place in Washington.
Hashtags have taken on new meaning in mobilizing American citizens behind a specific cause but that does not always mean they will become an overnight sensation. An example is #BlackLivesMatter which was created in 2012 after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder in the death of Trayvon Martin. But the movement did not reach a tipping point until August 2014, when protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager.
A new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults finds that political debate and discussion is indeed a regular fact of digital life for many social media users, and some politically active users enjoy the heated discussions and opportunities for engagement that this mix of social media and politics facilitates.
But with all the political drama happening in America today, I wonder how long this will last? Is it a trend…or is it a new reality of social media? The Pew Research went on to say that many people feel overloaded by political content and view their social media interactions with those they disagree with as a source of frustration and annoyance.
No matter what your political views, there’s no denying the influence of social media and how rapidly information is used to create a movement and forward topical issues in just a few hours. Yet the real question is will Americans become better informed activists or get worn out by too much political content in their feeds that they become disengaged followers?
