Social media was seen as a way to get to younger voters in the past few elections and in some ways it is still used for that, but it’s also become an easy way for some candidate’s to go after each other. For example, Trump has repeatedly attacked other candidates with name calling and rude comments on Twitter and I guess you could call this appealing to younger voters but not in the best way. In an article from last year they said, “What Trump understands is that the best way to dominate the online discussion is not to inform but to provoke,” (Carr). He knows very well that the worse things he says on social media the more publicity he will get for it and it kind of works for him because news articles are always looking for good stories where the presidential candidates are doing something unexpected like that. He and many other people have manipulated social media in this way. Instead of using social media for good by informing people they have abused the system and attack and provoked others instead of informing with facts or good information to back up their beliefs. This is a bad way people are using social media because instead of trying to state their points and explain why …show more content…
Back in the day when Abraham Lincoln was running for president instead of tweeting or going on TV and talking about his ideas he actually had to go from town to town spreading his ideas by word of mouth. He had to move to become well known and convince people to vote for him. This allowed for more accurate information being spread because you were most likely hearing the words right from the candidates’ mouth, but surprisingly there were still people trying to spread rumors about both sides of the election by spreading false information. It had less of an effect on the election though because these rumors spread much more slowly than they do today. I feel social media and has made this rumor spreading more readily available to more people because you can do it straight from home, but also in the 1700’s traveling and spreading their word consumed a lot of the candidates’ time up so the availability of information on the candidates can prove useful since you are less likely to hear political views straight from the person running. This is probably the reason why we have converted to streaming debates on TV today to get the candidates’ points across because it’s much faster and anyone with cable can tune in. I also think this is the