We recently turned our attention to the peculiar boycott decided by large multinational companies to control political advertising and hate speech in facebook ads.
The new chapter in this extremely interesting story is the campaign that recently ran through facebook ads by Donald Trump’s election campaign, which attacks (Chinese) TikTok accusing the app of “spying” on Americans by accessing other mobile applications!
The interesting part here lies beyond the strategic choices of a communication campaign built almost exclusively on conspiracy theories; this merely “testifies” to the consumer profile to which the current US President is addressing.
The new element is the very central role that social media now play in political communication. And we are certainly not talking about using them as tools, this is not new.
What is new, is their leading role in the political confrontation itself, that is, their behavior or their role as persons with important social and political influence.
Who does facebook work for? What political expediencies does TikTok serve? When these questions become central to the agenda of the US election campaign, one can see how much the role and status of new media in modern society has changed.
