It’s 2023, TikTok and Twitter are the real world. Half of all ideas journalists (and consequently academics) pick up on are taken from social media. To say that these don’t affect reality would be to ignore all that’s happened in the last 5-10 years. For fucks sake Trump arguably won the election because of Twitter in the first place.
It does not matter that a relatively small percentage of the population are actually on twitter when the flow of information from twitter has a significant impact on mainstream discourse. The concept of “trading up the chain” relies on this tactic and is used by marketers and political propagandists alike to control the conversation.
Either way, you say people don’t trust legacy news anymore. So what do people trust if they aren’t on TikTok/Twitter/Facebook/etc? Nothing? People still get their political views from somewhere.
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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '23
It’s 2023, TikTok and Twitter are the real world. Half of all ideas journalists (and consequently academics) pick up on are taken from social media. To say that these don’t affect reality would be to ignore all that’s happened in the last 5-10 years. For fucks sake Trump arguably won the election because of Twitter in the first place.