Social media as a communication platform creates new challenges and opportunities for political agenda setting. Social media do not just add a layer of complexity to agenda-setting dynamics. Potentially, they change their nature. While these changes have been recognized in the literature, their implications are not fully understood without these three argument.
✅ Social media have become a relevant channel for political communication (Chen et al., 2019 ) , Candidates and legislators use social media to communicate with journalists and the public and to engage with their political opponents .
Politicians are less restricted in expressing their opinions, compared to, for instance, parliamentary speech or parliamentary questions.
Legislative activities are often regulated, for instance, due to speaker selection rules, limited speaking time, or top-down control by party leaders.
On social media, however, candidates do not face these restrictions therefore, social media channels are an ideal tool for politicians to shape their own profile and display expertise in certain areas they are highly interested in . Thus, we regard social media messages as a suitable proxy of politicians’ issue emphasis during the legislative cycle and during election campaigns .
✅ Social media are relevant not only for political communication in general, but for agenda setting specifically : “the rapid rise of social media, including the micro blogging platform Twitter, has provided new avenues for political agenda setting that have increasingly discernible impact”.
A thorough understanding of agenda setting necessitates a broadening of focus including both traditional and social media. Social media have reduced the gatekeeping power of traditional media, leading to “hybrid media systems” that have expanded the number and types of actors who potentially have the ability to “introduce, amplify, and maintain topics, frames, and speakers that come to dominate political discourse”.
✅ Via social media political actors can potentially reach an audience that goes well beyond social media users. Journalists monitor social media activity closely and use it in their reporting: “tweets become public record and are increasingly incorporated into traditional journalistic coverage of political events”. The fact that journalists rely on Twitter to decide which events and voices are newsworthy is well established in the literature. As McGregor (2019, p. 1071) writes, “ Journalists draw on social media in various ways in the course of their reporting on political contests, from documenting public reaction to media events to evaluating the performances of candidates.” In an experiment, McGregor and Molyneux (2020) find that journalists evaluate the news-worthiness of tweets on par with headlines from the Associated Press wire. Therefore, political actors can realistically hope to influenc the traditional media agenda using social media.
In conclusion, social media change political agenda setting dynamics for three reasons:
1) They are a relevant channel for political communication
2) They expand the number and types of actors who can potentially shape the agenda;
3) Using social media, political actors can potentially reach the broader public via traditional media.
However, we expect the social media agenda to be more subject to media influencs than the “substantial” agenda, which comprises actual decisions.
