SOCIAL MEDIA AND POLITICAL JOURNALISM: HOW DIGITAL REPORTING SHAPES ELECTORAL CAMPAIGNS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65327/ssh.v12i2.2481Keywords:
Political journalism, social media, Electoral campaigns, Digital reporting, Political communicationAbstract
Social media has transformed political journalism by restructuring how electoral information is produced, distributed, amplified, and consumed. This review examines how digital reporting shapes contemporary electoral campaigns through changing journalistic practices, platformized communication, campaign strategies, algorithmic mediation, and audience participation. The synthesis indicates that political journalism has moved from predominantly centralized gatekeeping toward a networked model in which journalists, political actors, platforms, and citizens jointly influence the visibility and interpretation of campaign information. Digital reporting contributes to agenda-setting, candidate framing, strategic narrative formation, and the rapid circulation of electoral content, while platform architectures and recommendation systems increasingly determine patterns of political exposure. These developments expand opportunities for voter information, interaction, mobilization, and participation but also intensify challenges associated with misinformation, disinformation, deepfakes, automated amplification, fragmented information environments, and declining journalistic authority. The reviewed evidence further suggests that greater digital exposure or engagement should not automatically be interpreted as persuasion or voting effects, as electoral responses remain dependent on political, social, and media contexts. Significant geographic, methodological, and cross-platform research gaps persist. Future scholarship should therefore prioritize comparative, longitudinal, and multimethod approaches while examining generative artificial intelligence, algorithmic accountability, platform governance, and emerging political communication actors. Digital political journalism remains central to electoral democracy, although its influence increasingly depends on interactions between professional journalism and platform-mediated communication.
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