Last month, Joe Biden and his team utilized social media and celebrity power to raise awareness for women's health issues. Memphis rapper GloRilla was invited to the White House's Women's History Month event, where she met President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. After the event, GloRilla posted selfies with the president and vice president on social media and links to interviews covering the topic. This undoubtedly brought a lot of attention to the event as many other social media accounts talked about GloRilla's appearance at the White House.
During this event, "President Biden signed a new executive order to improve research on women's health and pledged $200 million over the next year to study the issues." (Grove, 2024) He also called for Congress to "make a bold, transformative investment of $12 billion in new funding for women's health research" (The White House, 2024). On the day of the event, President Biden signed a new Executive Order, which is considered "the most comprehensive set of executive actions ever taken to expand and improve research on women's health" (The White House, 2024). The executive order clearly included many things, but notably, it prioritized investments to women's health research and aimed to "assess unmet needs to support women's health research" (The White House, 2024).
GloRilla's appearance at the event and following social media posts brought much attention to the executive order passed by Joe Biden to improve women's health. I think it was a great call by the Biden administration to have a celebrity appearance at the event, as they knew it would bring much-needed attention to the event and the order. Without utilizing social media and celebrity power, many voters and citizens may have remained unaware of the executive order and Biden's efforts to improve women's health.
Sources:
Grove, R. (2024). GloRilla Talks Meeting President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. BET. https://www.bet.com/article/kwfeol/glorilla-meets-president-joe-biden-vice-president-kamala-harris
The White House. (2024). FACT SHEET: President Biden Issues Executive Order and Announces New Actions to Advance Women's Health Research and Innovation. The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/03/18/fact-sheet-president-biden-issues-executive-order-and-announces-new-actions-to-advance-womens-health-research-and-innovation/
A lot of politicians try to refrain from doing interview or even spreading their networking outside of other activists and politicians. As you can see it worked. Like you mentioned rapper GLoRilla came and created more buzz and got people to interact wsitht he link. I seen a lot of people on X (formerly known as Twitter ), admit that they only interacted with the post about Biden because they seen GloRilla on the front. Great Post!
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