Does social media have more influence than the government ?

Is it possible to say that social media has more influence than the government of a nation. In the past we would always say that he that holds your ear has power over you. The government used to be known for having control over the media. So what gets through to society has already been tailored by the powers that be. We can see examples of how the media truly influences our society, when the elections were happening the Sun newspaper, after years of supporting the labour party newspaper sided with the conservative party as there were a lot of good publications about the conservative party leader David Cameron, highlighting his campaign and giving him some great publicity, where as they played the blame game with the labour party highlighting all the bad decisions they made during their reign. What was the end result? The conservative party had a tighter race against the labour party than they have had in the past, and in the end they took rule as the government of the country. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/30/sun-ditches-labour-for-tories

We can even see that government are recognising the power that social media has by looking at the way Obama had many of the volunteers of his campaign using social media to promote his election to president. What that did was draw a lot of young voters who wouldn’t really be that enthusiastic about political campaigns, feel a greater sense of participation with Obamas campaign. "After Obama’s 2008 victory, OFA received widespread praise for its social media strategy. This admiration was deserved, mainly because OFA implemented a tool that was foreign to almost everyone else in professional politics. David Axelrod, top strategist for the 2012 campaign and former senior advisor to the president, acknowledged that “so much of our support [in 2008] came from younger, more wired people.” ". http://mashable.com/2011/10/24/obama-social-media-campaign/

Even now Obama is very much involved in social media, I believe he is the second most followed person on twitter, it is even said that social media will be the primary driver of Obama's re-election success for 2012.

What we now see with social media is the power coming back to the people. Information is no longer vertical, coming from one angle but it now comes from each and every individual who can sit behind a computer and share their opinion and get it to the rest of the world. It can be the cause of complete havoc, as was the case with the London riots. People were using social media to organise the riots in different areas and informing rioters when police were on their way, so they could move out quickly. The thing is with the internet being so hard to control; the authorities had trouble policing social media to be on top of the game. In cases like in the uprisings seen in places like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya social media played an integral part for gathering people together for a cause, any way in which you can gather people together for a cause is a demonstration of power, because a large amount of people united can overthrow any government. So now in the Middle East a lot of companies are investing in social media because they can now see the power and influence it has. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15435768


References:

http://mashable.com/2011/10/24/obama-social-media-campaign

Isaac Nartey