Em Talks Politics

  Ryan Ryder, a veteran from South Dakota, was running for Congress. After the announcement was made that he was running for Congress, questions were raised about his previous activity on social media. One tweet he posted involved suggesting that he should animate himself killing a Representative’s family. Another suggested that he should would perform sexual acts to a picture of Governor Kristi Noem. Ryder claims that context is important and that each tweet was sarcastic and rude to make a point against what those politicians had said or done.             Dan Lederman, South Dakota’s GOP chairman, believes that the democrat’s selection of Ryan Ryder was a mistake and suggests that he will likely be two-faced. Ryan Ryder won’t be the face of South Dakota democrats during this race, however. Ryder dropped out of the race after the enormous amount of backlash he received for his tweets.       ...

  More and more politicians are taking to the social media platform TikTok to connect with voters and campaign. TikTok allows users to create short videos that are typically only a few seconds long. Politicians are utilizing these short videos to briefly convey different policy platforms and different events they participate in. One unlikely politician using TikTok is Representative Tim Ryan, who started using the platform during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. He’d post entertaining political videos attempting to relate to his constituency during quarantine.             More and more politicians are taking to social media, especially TikTok, to relate to voters and motivate the masses. A prime example of this tactic was Senator Jon Ossoff during the most recent Georgia senatorial race. He posted many entertaining and trending videos that rapidly spread and reached hundreds of thousands of users. This helped motivate and e...

     Former President Donald J. Trump’s widely anticipated Truth Social has gotten off to a rocky start as many of the newly registered users are either highly inactive on the new platform or cross-post the same posts on other popular social media like Twitter of Facebook. Even politicians who have been outspoken about media censorship and the idea of fake news, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have been cross-posting on Truth Social and other previously criticized media apps. Truth Social is an application that allows users to post short messages to their following base in a similar fashion to Twitter. President Trump was suspended from Twitter in January 2021 for inciting the violence relating to the Capitol Riots and sought to create an unfiltered social media application. Many users initially flocked to this new social media platform after much anticipation, but there was not much on the app to hold users’ attention. Numbers show that many of the users that initia...

  Politicians typically use social media to connect with their constituency and to banter back and forth with one another, debating policy and often taking personal jabs. It is not often that we see a politician using their media to rally a nation such as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the face of Russian invasion. Zelenskiy has been using social media as a way to update the world on his participation and the escalating Russian invasion of Ukraine. He has been applauded worldwide for his dedication to his country, especially after refusing to evacuate the country. Instead, Zelenskiy chose to accompany Ukrainian troops fighting to protect their country.             This newfound worldwide respect for Zelenskiy is relatively new, as the former comedian and actor has been viewed as an underqualified underdog since he took office in 2019. Zelenskiy has been known for his casual selfies and short videos but has a new r...