Essay On Smear Campaign

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Damaging a politician’s reputation through social media has been prevalent in today’s generation. From around 1936, the phrase “smear campaign” has already been popular (Thomas & Hersen, 2002). In here, a smear campaign is an effort to damage or call into question someone’s reputation, by propounding negative propaganda (Thomas & Hersen, 2002). It can be applied to individual or groups but common targets are public officials, politicians, political candidates, activists or even ex-spouses. Nowadays, the growth of Internet and use of social media helped smear campaigns to be more powerful in damaging a public figure’s reputation. Smears often consist of ad hominem attacks in the form of unverifiable rumors and outright lies that are often propagated by the social media (Thomas & Hersen, 2002). Although the facts behind smear campaigns are typically demonstrated to lack correct foundation, the strategy is commonly effective because the target's reputation is tarnished before the truth is known. The appropriation of online smear campaigns has been a kind of a political protest (Ghobadi & Clegg, 2015).…show more content…
Rodrigo Duterte and Senator Leila De Lima. Also, this study relates to political psychology as it verifies that political situations simultaneously affect the behavior and perception of the people—for according to Stone and Schaffner (1988), political psychology describes both the effect of psychological procession on the political environment, and the influence of a particular political context on the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of its members. Therefore, the condition necessitates for a research to be conducted for the reason that online smear campaigns has affected the public standing of leaders in the Philippines including the perception of the

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