Title: Social media use in politics - Wikipedia
Headings: Social media use in politics
Social media use in politics
Contents
Background
Participatory role
As a news source
Attention economy
As a public utility
Government regulation
Effect on democracy
Democratization
The Arab Spring
Disinformation
Advertisement
Grassroots campaigns
Election interference
Election results
Impact on elections
Role in conflict
Non-state actors and militant groups
Weaponization by state actors
See also
References

Content: When political information is propagated in this manner on purpose, the spread of information on social media for political means can benefit campaigns. On the other hand, the word-of-mouth propagation of negative information concerning a political figure can be damaging. For example, the use of the social media platform Twitter by United States congressman Anthony Weiner to send inappropriate messages played a role in his resignation. Attention economy
Social media, especially news that is spread through social media sites, plays into the idea of the attention economy. In which content that attracts more attention will be seen, shared, and disseminated far more than news content that does not gather as much traction from the public. Tim Wu from Columbia Law School coins the attention economy as “the resale of human attention.” A communication platform such as social media is persuasive, and often works to change or influence opinions when it comes to political views because of the abundance of ideas, thoughts, and opinions circulating through the social media platform. It is found that news use leads to political persuasion, therefore the more that people use social media platforms for news sources, the more their political opinions will be affected. Despite that, people are expressing less trust in their government and others due to media use- therefore social media directly affects trust in media use. It is proven that while reading newspapers there is an increase in social trust where on the contrary watching the news on television weakened trust in others and news sources.