Nowadays, everyone’s on their phones, tablets, laptops or PCs and almost everything is online now. You could shop online, order food online and play games online too, all you’d need is Time Internet and you’re all set to surf the web. However, there are some things that you still aren’t able to do online like voting for any political elections because voting is an important thing to do and doing that online can lead to security problems. Even secured websites can be hacked, so who’s to say that online voting platforms can’t be hacked and tampered with. This can lead to so many problems like tampering with numbers or manipulating them for their own benefit. But what politicians can do is use online platforms to get more publicity which can, in return, help affect their voting results.
Whether it is in a good way or a bad way is totally up to how politicians carry themselves on social media. Some politicians have people who monitor or manage their social media accounts, filtering what can and can’t be posted. While some handle their social media accounts on their own and what, sort of, affects their voting results is how they portray themselves in the public eye. Anyway, it is, having a social media presence will greatly help them in terms of getting votes or gaining connections.
It’s important to have a digital presence in this day and age since almost everyone uses technology and is on social media nowadays. It’s to an extent that even children have social media accounts and it’s not just on one platform. Everyone is constantly switching between Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter. With all these platforms, people manage to actually spend hours upon hours on these platforms, either posting or creating content especially when they apply for Time internet in Malaysia because that is all that is needed, as well as a smartphone, laptop or pc, of course. Thus, with people constantly on social media platforms, it’s almost impossible for politicians not to gain traction, especially from the younger generations who are of voting age. This is to ensure that everyone sort of shows up to the polls. Most of the voters in Malaysia will be consisting of people born in Generation Z and Millennials anyway, so, politicians should try to cater to them as well to gain popularity, specifically through social media.
Gaining popularity doesn’t necessarily mean just for popularity itself. It means that politicians are gaining popularity for the sake of getting people on their side and getting people to actually favor them in terms of running a whole country. Politicians have to consider the fact that these are people who are quite young so it is harder to gain their trust.
A few politicians already have social media accounts and most of them post quite frequently on them, either about campaigns or about their personal life like spending time with their family. This also leads to them, sort of, getting closer to the people of their country, and in return, gaining trust as well. Other than that, this is also helpful when politicians are trying to keep up with trends or to at least be in the circle of current trends so they know what people like and do not like. For instance, general news or important news that can be easily accessed on the net rather than reading it in the newspaper because they do not even have to spend on newspapers when everything is so easily accessible on social media platforms like Twitter. All they would need is simply a smooth internet connection like with Time internet in Malaysia to access these.
Hence, you see how helpful and versatile social media platforms are in terms of helping politicians gain popularity, the trust of their people, and, thus, votes. Our society also benefits from having politicians on social media so that they can see how these people are and this gives them a clearer picture of who is running our country and how they are running it. It sheds light on the younger generation as well as how democracy works and why it is important in our country.
