The main feature of the Internet is a sharp reduction in the cost of disseminating information. The Internet has two types of information dissemination. Vertical – someone produces information, and it diverges to many users. These can be online media, traditional media web pages, blogs.

A qualitative change is taking place in the field of horizontal information promotion, where the phenomenon of social networks has appeared, and there it is not entirely clear who becomes the distributor of information. Some people are nodal, but in principle there is no clear hierarchy.

Social networks allow people to quickly exchange information, producers and consumers of information are often the same people. The Internet, again, has reduced the costs of communication between people – the prices of conversations have dropped dramatically.

There is a widespread belief that whoever pays calls the tune.

Subscribers bring a minimum, the main money the media get from advertising. You can expect that advertisers can influence the position of newspapers, newspapers write better about those firms that publish advertisements with them.

If you have an online publication and, in principle, you do not need so much money to maintain it, you are in a much more advantageous position in dealing with advertisers: if they start to put a lot of pressure on you, then you can give up advertising money and continue working.

A second cost-cutting effect is that the print newspaper has to be economically viable.

It is a known fact that people prefer to read news that suits their own convictions more – if they adhere to liberal values, then they only read the liberal media.

When it comes to large newspapers, they must target a wider audience; they cannot afford to be too radical, because this is too small a group of readers. An online publication can afford to target small, marginalized groups of readers and when using seo malaysia. This leads to the fact that we may have a growing fragmentation in the media.

Social networks allow organizing new political movements with a less pronounced hierarchical structure

Mass media appear that target specific and narrow groups of the population with rather radical political views, people begin to choose the media that correspond to their views, and only read them. They do not get any access to alternative points of view at all, falling into the informational cocoon.

If people on the Internet completely ignore information that does not correspond to their political convictions, then this will lead to an increase in polarization, there will be fewer people holding moderate views.

What social media does exactly what it does is build a civil society.

From the social network, you can quickly get a signal about the number of people supporting the movement. This plays a huge role in the protest movement, it is always extremely important how many more people take to the streets. With a large mass of participants, the likelihood that something bad will happen decreases.

The Internet, as a source of alternative information, can play a role in supporting opposition movements. But social media is obviously not a prerequisite for organizing a protest. They can help, it is difficult to analyze what would have happened if they were not there.