Being a World Citizen through Social Media

How is social media being used to create a more open government and facilitate policy discussions?


In the beginning of its development, social media was mainly used as way to interact and keeping in touch with friends and family or for some bands, artists to update their schedule and albums. But then, social media also gave strong involvement in political matters. Barack Obama was the one that raised social media to create an open global discussion. He mainly used Facebook as one of his campaign strategies in 2008. This strategy created his images as a president candidate who emerges himself into technology and acknowledge the young generation which spend most of their time on social media. Obama won the election and became the first African American President in 2008. He currently has a page in facebook that has more 20 million friends and twitter account which is followed by more than 9 million people all over the world. People can know some of his updated policies or his thought about some current issues and even able to talk through the social media.



In Indonesia, social media raised up as a new way to facilitate policy discussions in October 2009 when there was a case involving two state committee officials, Bibit Samad Rianto and Chandra Hamzah. They were the head of anti-corruption committee in Indonesia. There are lots of intrigues in this case because they were charged in bribery and have been a couple days in prison yet there has no strong evidences of their involvement in the case. Newspapers, televisions and other media covered this case as their headline or top news day by day. People are exposed by this case. The revolutionary way then was a facebook group that supports the release of two officials by trying to get one million supporters in the page. The group finally reached the amount of supporters which then influenced the policy discussion and decision of the Supreme Court. Bibit and Chandra were finally released at November 2009.





The well-known used of social media as the new way to create a more open government was in the Egypt case. By raising the movement through social media, such as facebook and twitter, the grass root movement has established a new government in Egypt. Egypt government had actually tried to ban the social media and it was not that successful. The reactions were not only from the African country or Arab’s world, yet this revolution also caught the reaction from all people through the world, including Indonesia. By the protests, discussion, or photos and videos that are exposed in the social media, the revolution ended by the resignation of former president Mubarak. There are still several controversies in this revolution, whether it is pioneered genuinely by the Egyptians or there are more external actors involving in this movement. The revolution is actually not ended yet; Egypt’s government is still in a transitional phase. But, this revolution has inspired some other African countries, such as Libya, Syria and Yemen to do the same. Social media has been a revolution tool to create a more open government, facilitate policy discussions, and also acknowledge each person as one of citizen of the world so that the involvement of a person in supporting or giving protests in public policy matters more than before.




Image source : Google Image