Western Political Discourse and Power Dynamics in the Age of Social Media

Abstract

The rise of social media has fundamentally altered the political landscape in the Western world, providing the promise of more direct, democratic freedom while also functioning as a tool to uphold and entrench traditional power structures. Through a combination of contemporary political research and the foundational philosophy of Plato and Rousseau, this paper examines how social media represents the potential for social liberation while continuously reverting to its position as a magnified reflection of the current state of politics in the West - functioning as an extension of the populism and outrage discourse that has come to define the politics of the 2020s. This paper concludes that social media has no inherent emancipatory substance that might liberate us from the sources of domination in our political institutions, but that it retains the potential to become revolutionary through broader social transformation.