Political Propaganda On Social Media

Social media has became an omnipresent tool of the 21st century. Nowadays, it is being used for a various of reasons, such as networking with one another, entertainment purposes, marketing and for political reasons.

The development of technologies has made it very accessible to disseminate external information and news around the world. However, not all “news” is news, andnot all “information” is information that the users are looking for. In other words, social media has been an effective tool to spread propaganda, biased and misleading informations to gain public attention. Social media users may not even realize that they are being brainwashed and given out misleading news. Political propaganda is commonly being promoted on social media websites, such as Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and the target audience is usually youth. In the past three years, Facebook has been used as a news source to disseminate political propaganda to brainwash the opposition as well as the target audience, the youth. For example, creating political meme pages is an example of a political propaganda.

There's a grain of truth behind every joke, this means that the creators of the meme pages often have goals to accomplish, which usually involves unnecessary drama that’s being started in the “comments” section. However, the targeted audience takes the misleading informations and jump to conclusions. For example, the presidential election of the US in 2017 played an immense role on the social media as well as in US. Facebook users created private groups called “Trump Supporters”, “Clinton Supporters” etc. On these meme pages, creators use specific captions so that they can catch the public attention and gain “views”, “likes” and a full “comments” section. For example, when a person comments “Oh, Clinton cannot rule the country because she’s a weak politician!”, the vast majority of the audience will take that into their consideration and often use it as their argument on other posts on Facebook. However, this is not true because everyone will have a different opinion on why she couldn’t rule the country.

As a politician, Hillary Clinton has contributed a lot to her country. While on the other hand, the media tries all of their best to cover all of the previous efforts of Hillary Clinton as a politician, so they can glorify Donald Trump and let him get number of presidential votes. For example, the slogan that was popularized by Donald Trump “Let’s Make America Great Again!” is a great example of propaganda. The slogan is very pleasant to the ear, but what does it actually mean? This slogan carries different meanings to different people. Nonetheless, no one has ever asked Donald Trump, “what do you mean by great again?”. On Facebook, thousands of anti/pro Trump supporters fight over these issues, but none of them critically think about the outcomes it may bring to the country. In other words, the political strategy is basically referred to “fake it, until you make it”. Users of Facebook, particularly youth don’t even realize that they are being taken advantage of. This strategy is related to the English idiom “killing two birds with one stone”.

This means that politicians take advantage of Facebook as a tool to brainwash the audience and Facebook uses the political propaganda to promote its website and make money out of it. When it comes to politics, social media has always been a tool to spread political propaganda especially when it’s Facebook that has more than one billion users. Let’s leave Donald Trump alone to make “America Great Again!”. Political propaganda is also being used to scare the audience in a way that would stop them doing what doesn’t benefit the government. For example, when there’s a presidential election in Afghanistan, the media goes viral by spreading propaganda across the countryand providing misleading informations to the public. When it comes to presidential elections, it is all about brainwashing and providing biased facts to the audience. The process of voting for the next president in Afghanistan usually involves a person dipping their finger in ink and leave the fingerprint on the paper. Women, men and even youth want to be heard and join others to vote for their future president. However, it’s not as easy as it may look. The Taliban gets involved with the election process in a very disturbing way. The Taliban films short clips of cutting people’s fingers off on Youtube, and this is to stop people participating in the elections. However, that’s not the case at all.

The Taliban doesn’t mind if people participate in the voting process, they care about who the people vote for. For example, if the opposition party doesn’t get enough votes, they will connect with the Taliban to spread the message to forcefully get votes. Taliban use a very strong technique of a political propaganda because no one would want to get their finger chopped off. In this case, the voters will either vote forcefully or won’t vote at all. These events have been an ongoing issue in Afghanistan, most likely in other countries as well. As mentioned above, politics use youth as their target audience. Just like in George Orwell’s novel 1984, many youth are very gullible and are easier to brainwash. For example, older individuals and seniors don’t always agree with what they hear on the news because they are more knowledgeable. Nowadays, youth learn everything from social media and on social media. For example, has anyone ever wondered how ISIS got very popularized and developed within a year? Social media has helped ISIS to spread its propaganda worldwide. Mostly, Facebook has been used by ISIS military to collect fighters and usually the age range of the fighters are from 18-30 years old. ISIS created private groups in support of the religion, and usually the goal is to connect and “help” out one another. ISIS has a very divergent meaning of “help” than the rest of the world.

For example, ISIS will use religion and God for its massive killings of innocent individuals. Has anyone ever wondered why ISIS shouts “Allahu Akbar!” during the beheading trials and bomb attacks? The actual phrase has been derived from Islam and it means “God is greater than anyone else”. However, almost nobody has ever wondered why would ISIS use that phrase during disturbing occasions such as beheadings, while bomb attacking a certain place. The hidden message behind this phrase is basically to tell people that as Muslims they are fulfilling one of the pillars of their religion. They record videos and post them on Youtube, so that they can brainwash the youth and get them involved in their dirty affairs. However, Islam doesn’t tell its followers to go around and kill innocent people so that they can be liked by Allah. Islam, just like any other religion, is the best religion, but the issue is the interpretation of Quranic verses by Muslims. However, the strategy of ISIS is to brainwash the youth by telling them that the killings and bomb attacks are for Allah and for protection of Islam. This is why ISIS connects on Facebook and creates private groups, to collect gullible youth who will fall into their political trap.

Many ISIS fighters are from different parts of the world. The development of social media websites has made it very accessible for ISIS to collect participants by providing biased information and get people in their revolting affairs. To conclude, social media has been sugar coating politics throughout the twenty first century. Some politicians use euphemism to make the words sound softer, than they actually are. Some politicians use propaganda as a way of sugar coating the truth and gaining public attention. Political propaganda is very widespread and usually the target audience are the youth. Youth spend lengthy amount of time on social media such as Facebook, Youtube and Instagram. The websites also get money by the usage of their websites. Is there any better way of using political propaganda on youth, other than on social media?