Introduction
Campaigns enable political parties’ members to ensure the public hears their messages. However, creating an environment where this data is accessible to all citizens, regardless of their affiliations or preferences, becomes harder every year. The last two elections have shown that people’s views within the nation continue to gravitate toward opposites and ignore others’ opinions. In such a situation, fairness and freedom to choose are impossible to achieve. Political campaigns are an essential part of elections that help individuals make sound decisions, yet there are adverse influences that distort the information and make people distrust their representatives.
Informativeness of Campaigns
First, the core of messages from each party must remain concise and easily observable. It helps people understand what to expect if either candidate is selected. Campaign activities focus on helping individuals make informed decisions by putting potential government figures’ values, commitments, and claims on display (Li 125). In general, they raise awareness of people’s choices, providing insights and outlining predictions about their country’s future. They reduce randomness in these processes and combat ignorance with clarifying statements.
This direction has been threatened by technology that permeates society. All parties’ 2020 Presidential election campaigns had to shift significantly toward online advertising due to COVID-19. However, this notion also brought to light a challenge that many individuals encountered when seeking official data online: the prevalence of bots flooding related Twitter hashtags and the spread of misinformation portrayed as candidates’ statements (Chen et al. 5). These issues made it problematic for people to form their opinions based on campaigns, significantly reducing their informativeness. Thus, new obstacles to democracy must be addressed before the next voting cycle begins later this year.
Funding
In the United States, people are free to send financial aid to any candidate they choose, potentially helping them spread the message further and raise awareness of the issues they seek to resolve. Funders for each party reveal what organizations and individuals tend to support it, yet it is not enough to mitigate the adverse effects of this activity. It allows people to add weight to their point of view, although it also enables them to promote their self-interest above those who are incapable of making similar expenses (Cedra and Daniller). Such donations threaten the integrity of elections, pushing certain agendas to the forefront of the country even when they do not benefit the majority of voters.
Democracy itself suffers in this situation, as public voices can be silenced for monetary gain. Lobbying has become a widespread issue for many U.S. citizens, as it promotes inequality within society. People believe that donors influence the decisions of members of Congress and do not strive to improve the situation for everyone, but only for themselves (Pew Research Center).
There is no chance to ensure fairness if such a notion continues to weigh down on government representatives’ actions. In fact, 72% of Americans oppose the idea of individuals donating unlimited money to support politicians they want to see in the White House (Pew Research Center). Thus, the public’s skepticism toward elections will only worsen over time if no change is made regarding this concerning trend.
Media Coverage
Media channels worsen the problem mentioned above by participating in information warfare against candidates whose leaders they do not support. People can no longer rely on a newspaper to hold their best interests in mind, as writers and editors inevitably portray politicians they dislike negatively (Li 129). This fundamental flaw, further exacerbated by sensationalism, leads many topics to be flooded with claims of fakery and misinformation. It becomes hard for a regular citizen to distinguish between biased and unbiased articles.
This problem overlaps with the notion of lobbying, as the same individuals who influence parties directly through donations also use their power to ensure that media channels state what they want (Watts et al. 3). Thus, this format of information transfer also worsens the informativeness of campaigns by reducing the visibility of genuine messages included in them. Purposeful distortion and bias among news sources create an environment that puts a strain on free political discourse.
Second, public discussions regarding this matter are heavily affected by bots, misleading content, and scandalous claims that spread rapidly across Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. Nowadays, social media is actively used as a campaigning platform, allowing candidates to reach younger audiences with ease (Chaudhry et al. 2). However, it comes with a steep price: these messages are put through the same engagement algorithms as content that is judged by its appeal to the masses, rather than its informative value. Readers can lose trust and interest in such advertisements if they are encountered during that period.
In the 2020 U.S. Presidential elections, the media negatively influenced people’s perceptions of fairness. Retweets and tags were weaponized against people trying to disseminate factual statements from major debates, as opponents injected #maga or #bidenharris2020 into every Tweet to make it pointless to use (Ferrara et al. 14). Twitter bots were especially prominent during that period, causing chaos for all parties. They were hiding campaigns’ messages, a heap of misinformation, such as spam, fake news, astroturfing, irrelevant data, and similar manipulative tactics (Ferrara et al. 5).
People are easily lost in this environment, being unable to form their opinions freely. After the event, they are likely to lose their trust in this media source. This notion is confirmed by sentiment analysis that reveals how the majority of Tweets from swing states support one individual, while posts on this platform did not correlate with the actual vote counts (Chaudhry et al. 9). Therefore, media pollution is extremely harmful to such a democracy, distorting information coming from candidates and injecting false claims instead.
Conclusion
In summary, political campaigns still have a place in modern elections. Still, there is a need to reimagine their format, as the current situation is spreading mistrust among Americans toward these activities. People strive to obtain relevant data about their choices and make informed decisions, since these choices can potentially change their future. However, there are barriers to this stemming from the media, donors, and the resulting rift of views within society.
The 2020 Presidential elections were plagued with issues arising from misinformation, manipulation tactics, and automated posters. In conjunction, these issues undermine perceptions of fairness and freedom of choice during political campaigns, requiring the government to respond to the aforementioned practices. Otherwise, citizens will no longer be able to form or express their opinions meaningfully, and their trust in their representatives will continue to fall.
Works Cited
Cedra, A., and A. Daniller. “7 Facts about Americans’ Views of Money in Politics.” Pew Research Center, 2023.
Chaudhry, H. N., et al. “Sentiment Analysis of before and after Elections: Twitter Data of U.S. Election 2020.” Electronics, vol. 10, no. 17, 2021.
Chen, E., et al. “#Election2020: The First Public Twitter Dataset on the 2020 US Presidential Election.” Journal of Computational Social Science, vol. 5, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1-18.
Ferrara, E., et al. “Characterizing Social Media Manipulation in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.” First Monday, 2020.
Li, J. “Toward a Research Agenda on Political Misinformation and Corrective Information.” Political Communication, vol. 37, no. 1, 2020, pp. 125-135.
Pew Research Center. “Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics.” 2023.
Watts, D. J., et al. “Measuring the News and Its Impact on Democracy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 118, no. 15, 2021.