Statistic has shown that the number of social network users are growing continuously. In June 2014, there are 1.28 billion monthly active users in Facebook, 255 million in Twitter, 200 million in Instagram as well as 1 billion Youtube users and 6.7 million blog users in total (Bennett, 2014). In 2016, it is estimated that there will be around 2.13 billion social network users around the globe, up from 1.4 billion in 2012 (Statista, 2015). These figures show how people now widely engage with communication through social media that surely change the way people communicate, including in political context. Within this particular context, social media serves as powerful platform for political expression and public debate (UNESCO, 2011) while there …show more content…
To discuss the issue of the influence of social media to democratic processes, this essay is divided into 3 (three) parts. First, it will explain the concept of social media and democracy. Second, it will discuss the role social media has in enhancing democratic processes as well as its limitations. Eventually, in the last part, this essay will draw a …show more content…
22) defines social media as “activities, practices, and behavior among communities of people who gather online to share information, knowledge and opinions using conversational media. Conversational media are web-based applications that make it possible to create and easily transmit content in the form of words, pictures, video, and audio.” There are various kinds of social media such as social networking platform like Facebook or Path, microblogging platform like Twitter, blogging platforms like Blogspot, Wordpress, and Tumblr, or video sharing sites like YouTube and Dailymotion. Compare to the early rise of social media, as mentioned before, there is vast development particularly in terms of number of users. It has been estimated that more than three third of netizens use social media. Furthermore, compare to other sites, people tend to spend more time accessing social media (Luttrell, 2014) and conduct their online social activities. With the existence of social media, this world becomes much more open and inclusive, in fact, the border between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ interaction has decreased (Lövheim, et al, 2013, p. 26). Furthermore, in relation with politics, there are two types of political internet use which are ‘active and passive forms’ (Bakker and De Vreese, 2011; Dimitrova et al., 2011; Kushin and Yamamoto, 2010, in Kruikemeier et al, 2013, p. 906). Active Internet users act as producers as well as consumers of political messages through