Social media in local politics
Where should a politician post?
Tonight I'm going to share some stray thoughts on social media and its place in local politics.
I won't say that Facebook and Twitter were ever necessarily forces for good in this regard, but they were definitely useful, at least for those of us engaged in local politics, advocacy or journalism. So many of my readers discovered APN because I used to regularly share my articles on either Twitter or in the once-formidable ATX Urbanists Facebook group.
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At least in part because Facebook made changes to its algorithm at the beginning of the Biden presidency to deprioritize news posts, it is no longer as popular a political parlor. People above age 30 are still largely on Facebook, but if they use it at all they're generally not using it for news and political conversation.
Meanwhile, Twitter has since turned into a fetid swamp of bots, trolls and ads, all nurtured by an algorithm that favors the stupidest and most hateful content on the internet, particularly that created by the app's increasingly deranged owner.
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