research-article

Politics and young adults: the effects of Facebook on candidate evaluation

Authors:

Scott P. RobertsonAuthors Info & Claims

dg.o '14: Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research

Pages 196 - 204

https://doi.org/10.1145/2612733.2612754

Published: 18 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

An increasing number of people are turning to social media to find political information and discuss politics, including the technologically savvy Millennial generation. Our study looks at how young voters use social media to evaluate political candidates. Subjects were shown the Facebook walls of two U.S. politicians running for the seat of governor in the 2011 Mississippi election. Exposure was followed by semi-structured interviews to discover what knowledge they found salient. Content analysis found evidence that the knowledge they gained from Facebook influenced their evaluation of the candidates. Further, we contrast this to a control group that was exposed to related news articles without a social media component. We found that social media produced the additional voting criterion of community, which extends beyond the traditional criteria in political science literature of issues and character. Community interaction influences the vote decision.

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Cruz J(2023)Mediated Participation Among Stateside Puerto Rican Youth: Political Networking, Voting, and Trump’s Lingering ImpactQualitative Research Reports in Communication10.1080/17459435.2022.215836425:1(30-41)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/17459435.2022.2158364
Halbach PBurbach LZiefle MCalero Valdez A(2023)News Articles on Social Media: Showing Balanced Content Adds More Credibility Than Trust Badges or User RatingsDigital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics and Risk Management10.1007/978-3-031-35748-0_31(439-460)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35748-0_31
Aman Ullah MArif Hasnayeen MShan-A-Alahi ARahman FAkhter S(2020)A Search for Optimal Feature in Political Sentiment Analysis2020 IEEE International Women in Engineering (WIE) Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (WIECON-ECE)10.1109/WIECON-ECE52138.2020.9397966(340-343)Online publication date: 26-Dec-2020
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Index Terms

Politics and young adults: the effects of Facebook on candidate evaluation
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Computing / technology policy

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dg.o '14: Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research

June 2014

365 pages

ISBN:9781450329019

DOI:10.1145/2612733

General Chairs:
Gabriel Puron-Cid
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
,
Scott Robertson
University of Hawaii
,
Program Chairs:
Jing Zhang
Clark University
,
J. Ramon Gil-Garcia
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 18 June 2014

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dg.o '14

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dg.o '14: 15th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research

June 18 - 21, 2014

Aguascalientes, Mexico

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dg.o '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 62 submissions, 58%;

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Cruz J(2023)Mediated Participation Among Stateside Puerto Rican Youth: Political Networking, Voting, and Trump’s Lingering ImpactQualitative Research Reports in Communication10.1080/17459435.2022.215836425:1(30-41)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/17459435.2022.2158364
Halbach PBurbach LZiefle MCalero Valdez A(2023)News Articles on Social Media: Showing Balanced Content Adds More Credibility Than Trust Badges or User RatingsDigital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics and Risk Management10.1007/978-3-031-35748-0_31(439-460)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35748-0_31
Aman Ullah MArif Hasnayeen MShan-A-Alahi ARahman FAkhter S(2020)A Search for Optimal Feature in Political Sentiment Analysis2020 IEEE International Women in Engineering (WIE) Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (WIECON-ECE)10.1109/WIECON-ECE52138.2020.9397966(340-343)Online publication date: 26-Dec-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/WIECON-ECE52138.2020.9397966
Haq EBraud TKwon YHui P(2020)A Survey on Computational PoliticsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30349838(197379-197406)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3034983
Metz MKruikemeier SLecheler S(2019)Personalization of politics on Facebook: examining the content and effects of professional, emotional and private self-personalizationInformation, Communication & Society10.1080/1369118X.2019.1581244(1-18)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2019
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1581244
Robertson S(2018)Social Media and Civic Engagement: History, Theory, and PracticeSynthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics10.2200/S00836ED1V01Y201803HCI04011:2(i-1123)Online publication date: 23-May-2018
https://doi.org/10.2200/S00836ED1V01Y201803HCI040
Dewan PBagroy SKumaraguru P(2018)Hiding in Plain Sight: The Anatomy of Malicious Pages on FacebookSocial Network Based Big Data Analysis and Applications10.1007/978-3-319-78196-9_2(21-54)Online publication date: 11-May-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78196-9_2

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