ONE of my favorite aspects of the recent holiday season was the absence of TV advertisements for Senate aspirants. Before, the televised spots started airing as early as October, seven months before the congressional elections.
This time, though, both terrestrial and cable TV networks have aired few political spots so far. I didn’t see a single one in the last three months of 2018, although I’m told that one of the aspirants, the late dictator’s daughter, had some TV ads. Some traditional advertising remained, and one candidate’s radio commercials and roadside tarps would suggest he has money to burn, but overall it has been a quiet pre-campaign season. I watched several episodes of “The Great Australian Bake-Off” and “Married at First Sight” in peace.
That quiet’s not likely to last. Long before the campaign period for the Senate and party-list elections will start on Feb. 12, we can expect political messages, including short video clips and memes, to become more pervasive on social media. But will we be better-informed about political actors, now that we have access to so much content about them? Will we make better choices?
Consider what’s happening in the United States, where some of the new legislators who took their oath of office last week have shown how adept they and their teams are at using social media.
Her first day in office had not yet ended when Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, sparked controversy. It was no secret that Tlaib was for impeaching US President Donald Trump, without waiting for a full report from special counsel Robert Mueller on whether or not the Russian government had interfered in the 2016 elections. Her language, however, still proved surprising. Just hours after Tlaib took oath, a video circulated on Twitter that showed the congresswoman vowing, “We’re going to go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherf---er.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, used social media to give her constituents and anyone else who may be interested a look at the orientation process for new legislators. She used Twitter to report that when she voted for the new House Speaker, some Republican lawmakers booed her. “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas,” she tweeted. Ocasio-Cortez has 1.94 million followers on Twitter, nearly thrice the population of the district she represents, and many of them affirmed their support when someone attempted to embarrass Ocasio-Cortez by circulating a video of her dancing in college. That attempt backfired.
There’s been plenty of hand-wringing about how social media platforms have divided us and made it more difficult to have useful conversations about political choices. Some of these concerns, such as the way disinformation spreads on social media platforms, are serious and need to be addressed urgently.
But there’s also a lot of good that we can glean from the transparency that social media-savvy politicians offer. In their posts, politicians can explain fashion choices (as Ocasio-Cortez does after her swearing-in ceremony) as well as policy ones (as the new lawmaker from New York does on her proposal to collect 70 percent tax from the super wealthy or those who earn more than $10 million). And let’s not forget that without social media, it would be so much costlier and more difficult for political newcomers to win public office.
Of course, at some level, politicians are performing on social media. Part of our challenge as voters is to keep track of how much of their campaign platform is eventually translated into effective policy and intelligent legislation. To ask for more than hype and hashtags, and to keep all in public office accountable.