Massacre of public opinion in digital political terrorism

Is social media now a necessity or a compulsion for political parties?

Exclusive Story By: Ahmad saghir

Social media is becoming increasingly popular because it directly addresses people and is considered a two-way communication tool. Digital platforms have reduced the gatekeeping power of traditional media and, potentially, they have increased the capacity of various kinds of actors to shape the agenda. This medium not only moderates public opinion but also helps change any pre-existing opinion. I study this question in the Pakistan context by examining the connections between three agendas: the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda of parties, and the social media agenda of politicians. Specifically, i validate and apply supervised machine learning classifiers to categorize 1.9 million articles published in 163 newspapers, including regional , National and International Newspapers , 11,000  tweets posted on official party accounts . 

210,000 tweets posted by politicians,  on their own accounts from January 2008 until  June 2022. I first use the classifier to measure the salience of the four most relevant issues of the period: the environment, Education, Health, and Security. Then, using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach, i analyze the relationship between the three agendas. Results show that not only do the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda of parties, and the social media agenda of politicians influence one another but, overall, no agenda leads the others more than it is led by them. There is one important exception: for the environment issue, the social media agenda of parties is more predictive of the traditional media agenda than vice-versa. These findings underscore how closely different agendas are tied together, but also show that advocacy campaigns may play an important role in both constraining and enabling parties to push their specific agendas. But one thing was very important that there was nothing in these tweets other than badmouthing opponents, mocking them or explaining any of their actions.  So to say that politicians are interested in public issues would be an absolute lie.  There were slogans, promises and suggestions in their tweets, but there was nothing remarkable that could solve the problems of the common people.

Now coming to people, social scientists have always divided the world into three different groups.  The regional or internal division of production is the latter, the first being the introduction of capital and production and its use.  In terms of dialectical materialism, capital also divides its distributed people into different classes, which include the rich, the middle class, the less rich, and the poor.Any society is divided into different classes, Pakistani society is also divided into three classes, the upper class mostly uses Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn.  The middle class rarely uses Twitter while mostly using Facebook and Instagram while the lower middle class only uses Facebook while LinkedIn is used to find jobs.  While YouTube has content for people of all ages and genders, upper class, middle class, lower middle class and lower class all use it.  Leaders of political parties think that they will convey their opinion to the common man by tweeting on Twitter, then this is their delusion.  Will be unable.  Achieving a target by creating a trend is a different issue, the trend is usually used by the mass media as news or the international community takes care of it, so it is understandable, but even within Pakistan, even today, a trend is common.  Couldn't attract the man.  Privately generated Twitter trends have always been used to sensitize governments, but their usefulness has remained elusive until today.  Now let's talk about the social media cells or strategic cells working within different parties, what work has been done by them, and have they been playing their effective role or because of them, any big change has happened somewhere in the world.  So the answer is, yes.  In the last few years in the world, where social media has created immense awareness among people, it has also explained the difference between good and bad, corrupt and virtuous people.  It is the wonder of social media that in some countries of the world, it has played a great role in overthrowing the government, throwing out the people in general and the youth in particular, and in running the movement, raising emotions and taking the government out of the houses under a systematic strategy.  

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