#trumptweets

Within every social media platform is the right to express your own perspective and views to the mass audience, which coincidentally is what I am doing today! I, as a digital citizen, am free to use Tumblr as a platform to discuss whatever I want, a liberty that could easily be misused to spread misinformation.

Being a digital citizen allows you much the same liberties of the public sphere, “unlimited access to information and equal, protected participation” (Kruse & Filchum, 2018), ensuring a community that, with platform facilitation, can express themselves freely. In particular, #Hashtag Culture is a way of narrowing down to a particular point of discussion, such as #auspol, which sparks “a lot of very spirited debate” (Mashable, 2018), yet both sides of the debate are given equal ability to be represented. A digital citizen is someone who actively participates in online discussions and allow it to inform their own actions as an individual in society, such as political voting or activism.

This digital citizenship is perhaps most drastically evident within the world of politics, which allows politicians the freedom to express themselves directly to their audiences, especially on Twitter. Tweets from political officials can be quite a diverse range of things, from Pauline Hanson advocating high speed internet for gaming kids in the bush, to more official addresses by people like the Prime Minister in times of crisis. These cases then spur a large manner of reponses from a community, one only has to look at the Liberal parties 50-second video on the government’s response to the Australian Bushfires of 2020 (in an attempt to recover from Morrison’s holiday) to see both sides being represented, one side thanking the government for their effort, the other chastising it. In this case, digital citizenship has allowed a streamlined expression of the public’s views directly to the politicians.

Lastly, pointing to this week’s readings based on the Clinton vs Trump campaign, we see a continued stream of this direct relation between politicians and the public informing activism. The notion of the “amateur… [strengthening] the image of a candidate as authentic” (Enli, 2017) is a continual thread throughout the Trump presidency and has been evident in the past few days with the “LIBERATE” series of tweets. In response, a large proportion of the republican community as begun to protest on the streets the “hoax” of COVID-19, whilst the left winged public have attempted to criticise.

Clearly digital citizenship is always at play on social media as users decide their opinions, values and activism largely off what they see on these sites.

References

Enli, G 2017, 'Twitter as an arena for the authentic outsider: Exploring the social media campaigns of Trump and Clinton in the 2016 presidential election', European Journal of Communication, vol 32, no 1 pp 50-61.

Kruse, LM Norris, DR & Flinchum, JR 2018 Social media as a public sphere? Politics on social media, The Sociological Quarterly, 59:1, 62-84.