Acta Universitatis Danubius. Communicatio, Vol 13, No 1 (2019)

Abstract

The decisive role of Social Media on citizens proved especially by increasing the proximity and accessibility of online public and political life not only contributed to the extension of political information, especially on the participation and involvement of citizens in political life. Moreover, Social Media has differentiated itself from other media through the possibility of personalizing political communication, technology that allows a large number of ordinary people to be connected and recognized by a large number of people. Also, there is an unprecedented correlation in any existing political communication system between social network mobilization process and personalization of communication. Thus, the more diverse the mobilization, the more personalized become the manifestations of the users, usually involving communication technologies that allow people to activate their fragile connections in the social networks. In the context in which politicians understand the user's psychology in social networks and behave accordingly, active presence in a social network can help in influencing the public, as a social network can be a very good channel for the propagation of messages, and through it it can interact more effectively with opinion leaders of online communities. However, these benefits only come if the candidate is personally involved in the network, without artificial messages written by campaign organizers.