The Impacts of Social Media on Political Communication: a Case Study of News on Chinese Officials' Corruption

In recent years, social media develops rapidly in China, and changes the traditional media pattern in this new era of information. Due to the widespread of social media, ordinary Chinese people now have different ways to take part in political events. Social media has become the platform of political participation and social governance for ordinary people. In this paper, news on corrupt officials is taken as an example to study the impacts of social media on political communication from the perspective of political communication. Then social media's initiative functions in the political communication, political participation and public opinion guidance are analyzed to confirm the strategic value of social media in political communication. Social Media Have Great Ability of Social Mobilization In the information era, the changes of media forms transform communication patterns. The widespread social media changes traditional media patterns, and brings new research topics to theory on political communication. Sex scandal is a topic which western media always take delight in talking about. News on unfaithful stars, clandestine love affairs of officials, and business tycoons who always chasing beauties are quite common seen in western media. In China, however, based on culture tradition and media management system, traditional media include newspapers, radio and television programs always adhere to the principle of positive guidance on public opinion; tidbits rarely appears in traditional Chinese media. Punishment reports can be found when the parties involved have been punished. Social media can disseminate contents produced by users. Without editors' evaluation, messages on improper sexual relations of officials spread quickly. Under the social background of comprehensive transformation of China, corruption of government officials and imbalance interest distribution mechanism accumulate large number of social contradictions. The public are ready to use social media as a platform to expose corruption and uphold justice. They expose, forward and comment related information, and thus form a kind of network crowd behavior. News on improper sexual relationships of government officials arouses public concern and indignation from time to time. "Micro-blog anti-corruption", "mistress anti-corruption" have become hot words on the network. A research report points out that 95% Chinese corrupt officials have mistress. Sex scandal has become the most short safety fuse for officials' downfall. Widespread messages on scandal official on social media not only discredit the image of public servant, but also highlight social media's power in information dissemination, challenge traditional political communication pattern, and highlight the public communication demands as well as social media's potential in social mobilization. Traditional Political Communication Pattern Undergoes Profound Changes From the traditional point of view, political communication promotes communication process through the dissemination of political information through various channels and the use of various symbols to influence audiences' attitudes and behaviors. [1] In the era of traditional media, political communication cannot avoid the disadvantages of persuasion and one-way indoctrination. Through media checks and agenda setting, all information disseminated on mass media is politically correct. The decentralization characteristic of social media changes this political communication mode. The general public is actively involved in the communication process as information source and medium, thus become the body of political communication. The public and the government can interact with 3rd International Conference on Economics, Social Science, Arts, Education and Management Engineering (ESSAEME 2017) Copyright © 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 119