Media advocacy includes all communication, which aspires to the exertion of influence.
Media advocacy is a broad concept, under which things such as sending announcements, advertising, sales work, lobbying, political speeches, religious sermons, demonstrations or salary negotiations can be grouped.
Media advocacy is conducted for various reasons, but generally aims at attracting the public’s attention to a person’s or company’s goals.
In order to reach out to the public, they often cooperate with the media.
It can aim to increase public visibility and interest so that the parties whom the communicator represents can tell their own stories with their own words. It can also aim to pressurise or persuade decision-makers.
Different public, private and civil institutions have a huge amount of information. In order to reach out to the public, they often cooperate with the media.
Political campaigns affected by advocacy
The role of social media in political campaigns has been under scrutiny since the end of the 2010s. One of the most scrutinised cases is the 2016 election and campaign victory of Donald Trump. In the middle of the debate is the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which is closely tied to the Russian government, and which has openly been called a “troll factory” (Bertrand 2017).
A research article by Bastos and Farkas (2019) describes the propaganda activities of IRA through a study of 826 Twitter user profiles and 6,377 tweets by the agency. In their study, they found short-, medium and long-term propaganda campaigns tailored to campaigns such as Pro-Russia, Pro-Trump and Black-Lives-Matter activists. Some other researchers, Fiegerman and Byers, investigated the same speculation in 2017, and in 2018 Twitter announced that its service was carrying 3,814 IRA-linked accounts, which indicates the scales of the IRA’s activities.
Reflection:
What could governments or social media enterprises do to fight harmful forms of internet activism during political campaigns?
Keep Reading:
Public relations officers and journalists; Marketing communications; Lobbying is convincing with arguments
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This article was updated on January 15th 2020.
