Social media politics: the experience of Taiwanese politicians

Since their successful use in Barack Obama’s 2008 US presidential campaign, social media such as Facebook and Twitter have become major political tools in Taiwan and elsewhere. This research uses a case-study approach to investigate why social media such as Plurk are so attractive to Taiwanese politicians. It finds that social media help politicians to establish alternative support networks that enable them to effectively disseminate information and to be more visible in the mass media. However, politicians have to surrender some control in order to obtain these benefits from social media, due to their Web 2.0 characteristics. In politicians’ use of social media, there is an interplay between top-down and bottom-up power structures.