Social Media In The Era Of National Political Safety Analysis

The social media, undergoing vigorous development, is present more and morefrequently in global events. Some scholars remark that we have entered the era ofsocial media. People now contact each other by means of this new communicationtool, which changes the traditional way of act, and ideology and social norms, andalso leads to dramatically changes in such aspects as global politics, military,economy, culture and lifestyle. Although the basic laws governing the operation ofinternational relations have not been fundamentally changed, the politics, economy,military, science and technology, culture and society across the globe have witnessedtremendous and profound changes, especially the national political security, on whichthe social media exerts unprecedented impact.At the end of2010, a sudden tide of political change swept through Tunisia andquickly spread to the Middle Eastern and North African countries. The social mediarepresented by Facebook and Twitter played an important role in said change. Manywestern scholars refer to said change as “social media revolution” or “Facebookrevolution”. Therefore, it is theoretically and realistically significant for upholding thepolitical security of our nation to study the characteristics of the social media and itsimpact on the national political security and present corresponding countermeasures.Starting from the social media and national political security, this thesisintroduces the emergence and characteristics of the social media, elaborates theconcept, contents and features of national political security, points out the reasonswhy the social media affects the national political security, analyzes the relationsbetween the social media and the national political security by making comparativestudies of four cases, namely the protest activities in the presidential election of Iran,Tunisia’s revolution, Egypt’s revolution and the London riots, researches therelationship model between the two and conducted verification, and lastly providesthe countermeasures for upholding the national political security in a social media erain accordance with the critical factors affecting the two.