Nowadays nearly anything can be found online fairly easily
with a few clicks of a button. Essentially, we have the entire world at our
fingertips. These days even our politicians running for office can be found on
social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and anything that is put
online will stay online for years to come.
It’s easy to understand why politicians would want to use
social networking as a platform during their campaigns and even after the fact.
But is all of this social networking and openness with the public going to
cause potential problems for them?
According to an article found in The New York Times
entitled, “Same Gaffes, but Now on
Twitter” written by David Carr, Sarah Palin felt under attack when over 24,000
pages of her e-mails from her time as governor of Alaska, were combed through
by journalists and the public.
It’s pretty safe to say that Sarah
Palin has remained in the spotlight for many years now and even uses Twitter
and does appearances to stay connected with her “fans” and to be able to
communicate with them. David Carr states in his article that,
“While e-mail, Facebook
and Twitter may be wonderful tools of engagement, easy communication has its
downsides.”
This is something that politicians should be taking into
consideration before saying, and putting the first thing that pops into their
head on the internet. Mark McKinnon, former media adviser to George
W. Bush and John McCain, also said that
“The digital revolution for a lot of people in politics is
like a high school party where they experience alcohol for the first time, they
get very excited, lose their inhibitions, say and do things they shouldn’t, and
realize too late they’ve made complete idiots of themselves. And then can’t
undo it.”
Palin isn’t the only one who has suffered at the hands of social
networking; just ask Anthony Weiner how he feels about the use of
twitter. In May of 2011, with more than 51,000 followers on Twitter, Mr. Weiner
found himself in the midst of a twitter scandal. The former U.S Representative
sent a sexually suggestive picture of himself through his public Twitter page.
According to a New York Times Article entitled “Anthony Weiner and the Game of
Twitter” author Virginia Heffernan says,
“Finally, in broadcasting a link to an intimate
self-portrait that he meant to send directly to another user, Weiner made a
common but still stupid mistake. Like faulting at a serve in tennis or losing a
pawn in chess, the mistake of accidentally tweeting a direct message in Twitter
— some Twitterers now call that error “pulling a Weiner” — can be trivial or,
as we now all know, extremely costly.”
It did indeed proved to be costly for Weiner. Shortly after
the scandal he resigned himself from office and I’m sure he’ll be more careful
the next time he decides to send out a tweet.
