Social Media as an Opinion Formulator : A Study on Implications and Recent Developments

Abstract
Social media has a great influence on how information reaches us and how we form an opinion based on it. For many users, social media increases the variety of information and ensure its accessibility across different platforms. However, recent years have seen an exponential increase in the power of social media. Most often, the forwarding and sharing of journalistic articles serve the recommendation from the user's point of view, but recently, these platforms have been developed into an echo chamber to transport additional information or even a critical attitude. In addition, the uncontrolled influx of social media in different parts of the world favors phenomena such as fake news and social bots. These threaten the exchange of views sought by mutual understanding and sincerity that democratic societies need. Motivated by these observations, this article aims to paint a realistic picture of the impact of social media. To do so, we discuss the recent developments and social changes and provide analysis of the global impact of the connected audience. Next, we shed light on some of the opinion formulation procedures and its key enablers. Finally, we present an explanatory discussion on the Facebook algorithms and provide two case studies in the wake of recent global events.
Main Authors
Format
Conferences Conference paper
Published
2019
Subjects
Publication in research information system
Publisher
IEEE
The permanent address of the publication
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:jyu-201911154879Use this for linking
Parent publication ISBN
978-1-5386-9509-8
Review status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICOMET.2019.8673509
Conference
International Conference on Computing, Mathematics and Engineering Technologies
Language
English
Is part of publication
iCoMET 2019 : 2nd International Conference on Computing, Mathematics and Engineering Technologies
Citation
  • Jameel, T., Ali, R., & Malik, K. A. (2019). Social Media as an Opinion Formulator : A Study on Implications and Recent Developments. In iCoMET 2019 : 2nd International Conference on Computing, Mathematics and Engineering Technologies. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICOMET.2019.8673509
License
In CopyrightOpen Access
Copyright© IEEE 2019

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