Israel’s Social Media Elections ()
ABSTRACT
Social
media has become a major tool to disseminate information, opinions and news,
used for political campaigning and offering new opportunities for individuals
and politicians alike. The Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, has
been particularly aggressive in his use of social media to gather political
support. Considered as the great survivor of Israeli politics, that flourished
in the atmosphere of social protests and emerged from the old political
mechanism, he derives his power from social networks, using them as alternative
media to the traditional networks. As the research demon-strates, social media
has determined dramatic changes in the balance of po-litical power, and
although the main channels of information remain the tra-ditional media, the
exposure of the public to social media is accelerating with a wide unmediated
public debate. With social media, newcomers in Israeli politics could also
create a presence and rise to become renowned politi-cians. It is interesting
however, that the veteran politician—Netanyahu—was able to take advantage of
disseminate information over the Internet and be-come active on his Facebook
page, including engaging Internet users in direct dialogue. The paper examines
the use of social media by newcomers and veteran politicians in the last two
elections and analyzes the way Netanyahu used social media to accomplish his
political goals, including high involve-ment of the public and motivating
record-high voter turnout to maintain his own reelection and the domination of
the Israeli Parliament by the Likud Party.
Share and Cite:
Katz, Y. (2018) Israel’s Social Media Elections.
Open Journal of Political Science,
8, 525-535. doi:
10.4236/ojps.2018.84032.