CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Social Networking have already transformed the national political landscape. In his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama pioneered the application of big data and microtargeting on social media, improving his chances of winning the presidency. More recently, a record number of women, Muslims, and people of color got elected into the 116th Congress. Many of these previously unknown politicians could win the office despite their limited financial resources thanks to their effective use of social media.
Tom Murse (2019), writing for Thought Co., indicates that “the use of social media in politics dramatically changed the way campaigns are run.” Social media use in politics is a new phenomenon in communications studies. Similar in manifestation to integrated marketing campaigns where branding and dialogue are key to success, political campaigns now use social media to establish the candidate’s political identity, to educate and attract voters, and to disseminate information. Allison Gosman (2016) explains that social media “has become a powerful mechanism for political campaigns to strategize their communication plans” leading to the creation of shareable content that candidates and supporters can use to increase awareness, engage public, and appeal for votes. Paired with traditional political analytics like party affiliation and exit polls, social media are useful in predicting voter behavior. Understanding the many platforms–their reach, capabilities, and mechanics–are essential to politics in the 21st century.
DiGrazia G. (2013) find that the online "'buzz' about a candidate on social media can be used as an indicator of voter behavior" specifically on Twitter and finds that this "holds regardless of whether the Tweet is positive or negative". Authors also conclude that polling data is only a subset of information candidates need to be successful; that social media analytics are essential in to the modern campaign.
With its low cost and high precision, social network platform such as twitter has quickly become a political necessity. It allows candidates with limited financial resources to communicate their message to specific audiences at a fraction of the cost of conventional communication channels. Couple with the fact social networking site have been used by different political candidates to gain online presence and communicate their with their audience and political parties hosting online campaigns, thus a ban in any of their social media handle such as twitter may affect electorates participation in politics thus increasing the high rate of apathy among eligible voter to elect such candidate.
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Younger generations are becoming more involved in politics due to the increase of political news posted on various types of social media. Due to the heavier use of social media among younger generations, they are exposed to politics more frequently, and in a way that is integrated into their online social lives.A communication platform such as social media is persuasive, and often works to change or influence opinions when it comes to political views because of the abundance of ideas, thoughts, and opinions circulating through the social media platform. It is found that political candidates through new on twitter leads to political persuasion, therefore the more that people use social media platforms for political news sources, the more their political opinions will be affected. However owing to the recent twitter ban by the Federal Government of Nigeria on 5th June 2021, there are speculation that this will have an effect on poltical campaign of both polotical candidates and sponsored political parties in Nigeria considering the forth coming 2023 general election. Suc effect might include less political participation of legible voters in the electioneering or negative choice while voting a representative due to lack of information about the candidate which would have been made handy on social network platforms. Therefore it is against the backdrop that this study is geared towards examine the effect of twitter ban on political campaign.