Social Media in Politics

Kindelan, K. (2011). Social Media in Politics: Positive or Polarizing? Retrieved from http://socialtimes.com/social-media-in-politics-positive-or-polarizing_b42439

The topic of Kindelan’s article is the role of social media in the US midterm elections in 2010.  She questions the advantage of social networks for voters and the functionality of social networks for our democratic system. Many voters now prefer going online in order to get information about their candidates. This doesn´t necessarily mean that they visit their candidates website, but they visit blog websites or social networks to discuss and exchange information. According to Kindelan, the Internet has an unexpected influence on the elections. A study by the Pew Research Center says, that more than one-third of the responding persons elected their candidate because of the information they found on the Internet. Kindelan also argues that this development could make it easier for extreme political ideas to spread out. She says, that we have to keep in mind, that not everything on the Internet is necessarily true. She collected her information from a study by the Pew Research Center and she interviewed the report’s author and senior research specialist at Pew Internet Aaron Smith. This article again questions the reliability of the Internet. Especially in politics it’s easy to find wrong information from the Internet, so we should read blogs carefully and double-check the content before we make our choice based on Internet sources.