The Rising Influence of Social Media in Democracy

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Hi guys,

How are the Easter holidays going for you? Over here we have a lot of fun packed activities for the Easter holidays. Here in Ghana we don’t play with holidays and Easter holidays are one of the holidays that we packs a lot of activities cause it’s more than a day holiday.

Let’s look at the topic of today which has to do with social media and politics.

In this day and age one will have to be blind, deaf and dumb to deny the impact that social media has on our lives. Social media has come and changed how we leave our lives. Most at times i argue that yes it has changed our lives for the better but then it also comes with a lot of challenges which shouldn’t have been available.

Social media in its full glory has changed how a lot of people think and function and even though some people might not have a problem with it, it is still concerning. Imagine someone being comfortable with exposing him or herself online but is not comfortable exposing him or herself outside. Forgetting that online a lot of people will end up seeing it as opposed to the limited number of people who will end up seeing you when you go outside. This and many more are some of the bad habits that social media has inculcated in us.

Ghana had their elections last year. Before the elections a lot of polls were flying around social media about who will be the possible winner of the election. A lot of people said those results were not what will reflect on the day of the elections simply cause they said most of those people might not even go out and vote on that day. The real question is, how many people are on social media out of the total population in the country? We can argue that we have a lot of the gen Z who seem to understand how this social media stuff works in there but that we don’t have the millennials and the older generation in there.

As much as I agree with this assertion, I also think it’s totally wrong to ignore what the people are saying on social media. We have seen how numerous campaigns have been started on social media and most of them have been a huge success. I remember last year when the youth of Ghana started a stop galamsey protest online and took it to the streets as well. Before this demonstration a lot of people didn’t pay much attention to the harm that this illegal mining was causing to our water bodies.

I also remember last 4 years a young man stop for mp in a constituency in Accra. According to the natives who were the older generation they didn’t want him to win but this young man did not only take up his campaigning on the grounds serious but also took to social media to make a lot of noise. In the first try he didn’t win and a lot of people attributed it to the gen Z’s not coming out to vote cause they were on vacation. He went back and took his work serious and this time round he won. His opponent was an older woman so she didn’t think it was important to catch the masses on social media as well but the younger man saw it’s important and did the job perfectly.

As much as we are praising it for helping politicians positively we must also acknowledge that some politicians are using it in the bad way. Some use it to spread falsehood about their opponents which is normally very difficult to wash away.

So as much as it’s a good tool we also have to find a way to fact check every information which is put out their especially but opponents.