Social Media and Politics

Then:

While politics is an old subject with old rules, there comes along every once and a while something that changes the nature of politics and one of those things is social media.  Social media as a subject however is a new phenomenon and it is difficult to talk about its past because it is relative new.  The past for social media is short (Facebook is only about 12 years old and Twitter is about 10 years old) as far as presidential election cycles that means they have both been around for about three of them.  The subject of what effects they have on politics is equally new.

It is somewhat debatable when or if social media began to influence politics but it was early on that candidates used the new mediums as means of promoting themselves and this continues to do so.  The problem is all the theories are new and varied as far as what constitutes influence.  Social media early on though has been used to organize groups for political action and activists have seized on the idea of using social media to organize and plan events.  It has been in the past as a counter journalism to the mainstream to present events live and up front.

Social media is about connections and so is politics so they were a natural fit right out of the gate.  In large part, what has been explored in the past is how social media can organize and shape the face of politics through information and education.  If there is a problem with talking about the history of social media and politics it is that it is short and it is difficult to draw any hard and firm conclusions.

Now:

When it comes to things involving politics and social media dwell in the realm of theory and there are many. Sociologists and political sciences have debated even what social media is, but the conclusion in general is that it is a media that is used for social interaction that encompasses political empowerment and activism but also a reflects popular culture and entertainment.  In other words, social media can have many uses for social interaction but allows for political activism and empowerment.

The first concern of these new media sources is what they are doing to conventional and current media and the questions are more prevalent than answers.  The first being whether social media even influences political outcomes or simply provides a better platform to do already existing political activism.  This a real question because the question is raised as to how significant is the power of social media itself.  One answer is that social media is no better or worse as far as influence in and of itself but that political activism and change requires the same thing it has always required – passion for a cause.  Without this passion, many argue social media is just social media.  We may be more informed as to the issues facing us and have better connections but motivating people to act requires something greater than what social media can provide.  

If there is any place that is not being disputed is that social media is providing alternatives to traditional media.  Most younger activists glean all their news from social networking rather than tradition news casts or twenty-four-hour news networks.  This is what has made it difficult in many recent elections to get accurate polls as the younger generation of millennials don’t live in the world of home phone polling or traditional news source polling demographics.  This last election cycle, several networks admitted that their polling data for millennials was inadequate. 

On the other hand, Twitter Traffic this last election was off the charts indicating how vital it was to encourage people to vote and promotion of candidates.  The consensus is that Trump won the Twitter wars and it has lead some to think that it is what gave him the election.  Others simply state that Trump had the ability to leverage Twitter but whether this gave him the election is a matter for debate and it may take several months to fully analyze the data. 

In any case, Trump had much more social media popularity in the early going and many pundits pointed to this data as a potential for a Trump victory and they turned out to be right.  Political scientist will probably be talking about this for a while as to how many likes a candidate gets during the campaign and their margin of victory.  

As more hard data and studies are done, social media is used by candidates to organize and network but it might also be said there must be that passionate spark for a candidate or the best social media campaign might not help you win.  Is social media the creator of successful campaigns or is social media buzz the reflection of a campaign that already is successful? That is a question for the future as there simply is not enough data from enough different election to draw truly firm conclusions yet.

Later:

There have been many innovations in the history of politics and technology and many of them have had a significant effect.  The question for political scientists is what effect long term will social media have on political activism campaigns and elections in the future? 

There are simply too many reports now to sort this stuff out.  Every time I did research I got conflicting data and pundits taking both sides of the social media issue and its effect on political activism. 

Some argue that social media is just an extended way of spreading one’s own opinion and it affects very little actual change other than people’s voices have an extended range.  Others argue that it causes change in people’s opinions.  Another side of this battle, is whether campaigns with social media decide elections or the message and passion must be there.

I don’t see social media and politics departing from each other anytime soon regardless of the conflicting data.  This seems to be a match that is destined for a long partnership.  As time passes answers will come, but until clear answers are given Twitter campaigns and Facebook Memes will continue to dominate the face of politics for the foreseeable future.

Politicians will continue to hire social media directors for their campaign.  If there is one thing for sure politicians must get used to the transparency of social media and how instant it gets messages to the masses.  The transparency issue has victimized many older politicians as it becomes difficult to retract or reverse one’s positions without the other sides social media instantly crying “flip-flop”.  Lying I think will be much more difficult so perhaps social media’s transparency will finally end one complaint about politicians. 

If there is one dream we all have, it is that politicians will leave the realm of rhetoric and get to having actual ideas that will help.  Ass much as we can decry lack of privacy and the government looking in on us, social media give people the power to record and transmit information about politicians, political activism and elections that make it more difficult to get away with fraud and other election shenanigans.  Perhaps on the future this will get so prevalent as to clean up politics.

If recent election result is a consideration, then I think the opposite is true.  Every flaw of every candidate was revealed and yet no a single thing seemed to affect the candidates to the point that it hurt or helped them significantly.  Is apathy more the trend?  The current climate of mudslinging and no one caring if the mud is true or not, would indicate that social media is becoming so prevalent and common place that apathy toward it is more common that actual activism resulting from it.

Whatever the future hold until the next big thing comes along to replace social media, if it ever does, one thing is for sure its influence will be debated and researched.  Our only hope is that as future research is done the influence and affect it has will be better understood.  

     

References:

Ciment, J. (2013). Social media. In R. Chapman & J. Ciment (Eds.), Culture wars in America: An encyclopedia of issues, viewpoints, and voices. London, UK: Routledge. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.libcat.ferris.edu/content/entry/sharpecw/social_media/0

Atton, and Atton, C. (2010). Alternative media. In J. Downing (Ed.), Encyclopedia of social movement media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.libcat.ferris.edu/content/entry/sagesmm/alternative_media/0

van Tryon, P. (2015). Integrating social media into learning and instruction. In M. Spector (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of educational technology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.libcat.ferris.edu/content/entry/sageet/integrating_social_media_into_learning_and_instruction/0

  

Video Games and Regulation

Then

The history of the regulation of the video or electronic gaming industry starts very early with attempts to regulate youth and children’s access to video game arcades in the 1980s.  With curfew rules being still in effect in most communities, a logical extension was to limit the access to certain areas and buildings in the communities.  There was some concern for the content of some games but the concern was largely limited as graphic quality was very primitive so most concerns were quickly dismissed.  This changed and grew as the quality of graphics and the nature of games improved and changed.

The immediate concern as things improved was along the lines of sexual content, nudity and violence.  Graphic quality had improved into the 1990s and some content became more closely scrutinized. As much as there was a call to have government regulation, the gaming industry was growing at such a rapid rate the industry itself began to promote their own ideas of self-regulation with rating systems.  Such systems were initially placed by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).  The rating had a basic component of E for Everyone, T for Teen and M for Mature.  In addition, it had over 30 different letter designations to give more specific indications of what the content of the software or game had so parents could see whether to not they wanted their child to own and play.

The video game industry because of this avoided most scrutiny until the mass shooting at Columbine which brought attention back to video games because of their supposed connection to the shooters.  The theory was that the games created the violence in the shooters but opposition voices stated that the shooters were already predisposed to violence so they were attracted to the games.  The research later supports the second theory but regulation was passed to make it crimes to sell games with adult or mature ratings to minors a crime although enforcement of these laws is nearly impossible. 

The battle at this point began as to whether video games are entitled to free speech rights or not.  Early efforts were designed to restrict sales of games but as the medium of gaming has evolved and changed it is nearly impossible to control the copying and distribution of games.   There still was some call to regulate content however as some games attempted to sneak adult content into mature rated games in the early millennium (notably Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas which snuck and sex orient mini game into its code).  The backlash caused a renewed effort at self-regulations of the industry which for a while seemed to stem the tide.

Now

The thing about rating systems is that each different medium seems to use a different one and the video gaming industry is no exception.  Unlike the Motion Picture Associations rating board which is independent of the film industry itself, the ESRB ratings board is a self-regulation body which is not independent. The free speech issue continues and so things are constantly a struggle between this idea of free expression and protection of children, youth and others. 

For the government, the choice has mostly been to let self-regulation continue in the video game industry as it is 1) the most cost effective way to regulate and 2) avoids the free speech controversy completely.  There is one notable exception to this rule which remains involves distribution of games to minors.  Even so this regulation while on the books is difficult to enforce in a world where parents can download the game but allow the minor to play it.  In addition, there are now thousands of independent game developers that put out a large amount of games often without ratings.  This creates the problem of how to regulate a game for distribution when it has no rating to begin with. 

The point then can be made that self-regulation has its weaknesses.  One is that independent developers are not necessarily required to get ratings so the content might be unknown and that it depends largely on the game developers as to how closely they want to comply with those self-regulations.  One other current ways of self-regulation content of video games is for members of the industry to follow a code of ethics.  Such codes however are often worse than organizational self-regulation as they are easier to break without penalty. 

  

One problem for government regulation though is that the gaming industry so rapidly changes that once regulations are passed they are often obsolete as deliver systems and game content often changes with so many games coming out in multiple platforms.  The current download structure for games on sites like Steam mean that the person downloading the game could be anyone and now there is no physical disc to regulate as well.  This means that laws designed to keep children form seeing forbidden material are possibly obsolete as there is no way to control a download system online.  There is no way to guarantee that the recipient is an adult and so game producers are left simply producing games, selling them and distributing them without any way to control who gets them. This makes the self-regulation of gaming ratings difficult as well.  The industry can slap a rating on the description, but it can be completely ignored.

The issue of independent developers also has other issues.  Often independents remain so because it is their design to produce games with questionable or objectionable content.  They become underground developers to produce games that would by any self-regulation standards would have such red flags they might not even be sold. 

Later

If there is a discussion that remains it is the issue of free speech.  The industry itself is pretty divided as to where the world of video games and regulation will go from here.  Underlying this issue is whether video games can be considered art or are they merely toys.  If they are classified as art then free speech rules come into play as they would for sculpture, paintings or drawings.  If they are merely toys, then toys have been regulated to death as far s safety and content with little regard to free speech rights.  The question is do video games cross the line into art as it is no longer an activity solely for children?  Does the artistic nature of game graphics make them art?  In 2011 the National Endowment for the Arts declared video games an art but is that sufficient to classify them as such? 

It’s the question from a legal standpoint that remains unanswered that could have the most effect on the gaming industry.  Games now involve a large amount of creativity from development, story writing, and graphics.  In many ways, it is a merging of many artistic forms into a completely new art form.

 

Critics argue that games are still ‘kid stuff’, but when some of the themes of games can be very mature and with multiple endings possible depending on the choices of the player in a sense it is multiple movies overlaid that is interactive, this definition is difficult to maintain.  Truth be told the fact that games often have a story nature that is much like any other story that would fall under free speech rules and then the graphic arts part of games simply makes the games seem much more like art than just ‘kid’s stuff’. 

I think this is why government regulators will continue to focus on distribution rather than content to avoid this fight altogether and the video game industry will continue to promote self-regulation for the same reason.  There is a lot at stake with this definition as to whether this media is art or toys.

Government regulators on the distribution front are encountering a system now that distributes view the internet and as that continues, this will make things very near impossible as controlling who games are distributed to and the underground system of independent games will compound this.

 

I have watch this fight from beginning to end and right now I think things will remain as a stalemate.  It is better described as a Mexican standoff as the government regulators could lose a lot of control if video games are classified as art.  On the other side, the gaming industry could face severe regulation if games lose the protection of ‘free speech” On the side of the unknown, could such regulations then be enforced given that the reason the governments of federal and state keep self-regulation in place is that without it they would be overwhelmed.

 

As time passes, technology and innovation might make games even more artistic and that might mean that government officials might sense that challenging the artistic nature of games more and more difficult which would lead them to continuing the situation of self-regulation of content and some regulation of distribution.  Future innovation may change this, but I don’t see too much changing until such innovation actually comes along.

References:

Skalski, and Skalski, P. (2007). Regulation, Electronic Games. In J. Jensen Arnett (Ed.), Encyclopedia of children, adolescents, and the media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.libcat.ferris.edu/content/entry/sagecam/regulation_electronic_games/0

Lambe, and Lambe, J. (2007). Regulation, industry self-regulation. In J. Jensen Arnett (Ed.), Encyclopedia of children, adolescents, and the media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.libcat.ferris.edu/content/entry/sagecam/regulation_industry_self_regulation/0

Warren, and Warren, R. (2007). Parental advisory labels and rating systems. In J. Jensen Arnett (Ed.), Encyclopedia of children, adolescents, and the media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.libcat.ferris.edu/content/entry/sagecam/parental_advisory_labels_and_rating_systems/0    

Television Advertising and Regulation

Then

Advertising fraud is not a new thing in advertising but it is on television that the most controversy takes place because it is much more difficult to protect the consumers when it comes to something with visual component and the potential to deceive through misleading visuals and over the top claims is very high.  Oddly enough the issue of free speech was never considered in this issue as the ruling of the government was that free speech did not extend to advertising per se and it wasn’t until the 1970s that that changed a bit to say that advertisers had the right to limited free speech. This gave advertisers a little more leeway but from the standpoint of many consumer groups this has been a little too much as they seek to get more standards on advertisers about claims, content and the effects that advertising can have on teenagers and children.

The most significant action in the United States regarding advertising was the creation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to regulate all ads although consumer groups have always complained that the FTC about fraud cases against advertising has a poor track record of success. Consumer groups seem to have a better record of success in getting results against fraudulent claims historically than the FTC. The FTC has been in the past reliant on regulation being complied with by the advertisers on their own as they often do not have the size to police all ads effectively.  It does rely on consumer groups to help.

Past issues of regulation for the FTC have included effects of ads on Children and Teenagers as well.  In large part Television ads for smoking were removed to prevent the influence the cigarette companies were having on teenagers with their cool ads on television and then later in magazines.  Infomercials were banned at first because they could target children who it was deemed could not tell the difference between a show and a commercial.  This was the same rationale that was used for toy manufacturers not being able to advertise products at the same time as a show the toy represents.  This changed in the 1980s when Transformers and GI Joe were allowed after deregulation to advertise transformer and GI Joe toys at the same time the show was on.  I saw this happen and there was a lot of talk at the time as to how this would influence children.  In the end, all we could say is that it caused them to make and association between the two and buy more toys related to the show.

One other thing could be stated about regulation in the past is that the FTC did not in the past (nor the present) must prove that claims of advertisers were not true, but that at the time the advertiser had no basis to believe it was true even if it is found out later that it was true.  It simply has to be misleading in its claims.  One pain reliever fell into this trap several years ago claiming it was better at stopping headache pain than other pain relievers but failed to mention that its main ingredient wsa aspirin one of the pain relievers it was putting itself up against.

              

Now

Despite the FTC’s oversight advertisers are still very much capable of running false ads.  Some of their techniques, regardless of regulation, are still questionable.  The most common misleading techniques have been long documented and you can have a closer look at them here:

That said there are three forms of regulation that are currently employed to combat these tactics and they are: Government agencies, consumer groups and self-regulation. 

Government agencies covers most of the official regulation of advertising with the FTC being the top of the regulation pyramid as far as regulation importance.   Under this agency state agencies align themselves as well as self-governing bodies that we will talk about later.  There is a twofold aim of these regulatory bodies.  One is the impact of the claim the advertisers make on the target audience and the other is to police false or misleading claims.  The first measures the effects of advertising on groups that are considered vulnerable or impressionable – children and teens most often but now on the elderly more and more.  The second is to determine if the ad was misleading in any way and that does not mean the claims are untrue but that the way the ad presents them might give false impressions as well.

The second advocacy agency is consumer groups.  Group like the National Advertising Division (NAD) and the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) of the National Advertising Review Council (NARC) all use FTC guidelines and were largely the product of the leadership of militant consumer advocate Ralph Nader or are at least his advocacy children.  These group are more often than the FTC to take immediate action on false products or products they deem harmful in some way.  Because they often have the funding and the ready-made advocacy base of supporters they are often more effective in helping consumers take on misleading claims than the FTC. They also are the first to damage an advertiser in the place that matters most by helping victims of fraud sue the company responsible.

Finally, many companies that sell products self-regulate to make their companies at least appear more legitimate by coming under certain voluntary standards.  Groups like the Better Business Bureau (BBB)and others seek to run under certain common standards for advertising that seek to comply with the regulations and even go beyond them to present their companies as trust worthy.  It is also not uncommon for these groups to work with consumer groups so that there is a double seal of approval on the advertiser that this product’s claims have been double checked on all fronts before they are presented.  Whether perception meets reality is a matter for some debate but the effort is to make provide a respectable side to advertising products even though advertisers and their agencies routinely finish at the bottom of the list as far as trustworthiness.

          

Later

Looking to the future of advertising regulation, I can personally see nothing on the horizon that will change the current situation.  The FTC remains the body of regulations on advertising along with local agencies, but their lack of manpower will always mean they can only deal with a select group of violators.  Their record is one of filing very few claims against advertising and getting few convictions.

The most effective form of ‘regulation’ is probably going to continue to be the partnership that exists between consumer advocacy groups and self-regulating bodies on the world of business.  This is simply because these two institution do not have the red tape of bureaucracy to deal with when a problem with an ad is reported to them.   They can act and advocate for the victims of bodies can pull their endorsement faster than the FTC can act to bring charges and prosecute them.

 

If there is one thing that has changed television it is streaming has made ads more prevalent and varied.  This has made the FTC’s job even far more difficult because ads are difficult to police and now there are even more to police.  This is going to probably invoke some changes to the FTC being necessary but more importantly consumer advocates and self- governing bodies should be even more active but there is also something to be said for personal responsibility.

In the early days of advertising, the slogan was ‘let the buyer beware”.  Later as television regulation became more extensive then the slogan became ‘let the seller beware” but now things are changing so rapidly it may be rapidly be changing back to ‘let the buyer beware’ because the FTC, consumer groups and self-regulating bodies are becoming rapidly overloaded. 

This is what may make the internet even more important as people review products online and report problems.  It is ultimately networking between people who buy products and have concerns about how they are being advertised that may be the new type of consumer groups.  These groups may be less formal but they are no less effective at creating awareness about product ads and whether their claims are fraudulent or controversial.  Social networking is taking this to a whole new level as product reviews can almost be instantaneous.  How this will ultimately affect ad claims and regulation is anyone’s guess.   

References:

Mosdell, N. (2009). Regulation (Television). In Q. Langley et al., Key concepts in public relations. London, UK: Sage UK. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.libcat.ferris.edu/content/entry/sageukpr/regulation_television/0

Lee, S. and Lee, (2007). Advertising, regulation of. In J. Jensen Arnett (Ed.), Encyclopedia of children, adolescents, and the media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.libcat.ferris.edu/content/entry/sagecam/advertising_regulation_of/0

Cheng, H. (2004). Advertising fraud. In L. Salinger, Encyclopedia of White-Collar & corporate crime. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.libcat.ferris.edu/content/entry/sagewccc/advertising_fraud/0