Title
Tweets and Posts: Social Networking Sites and Political Knowledge in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
2018
Abstract
To what extent does a political candidate’s social media presence influence people’s views and their real-world political activities? We conducted a survey using Mechanical Turk asking questions about social networking use and political involvement with regard to the 2016 presidential election. We asked factual questions about politics to gauge political knowledge. We find low-information voters are more easily influenced by friends’ posts and are more likely to be influenced by candidates’ social media to change real-world political activities; in contrast, high-information voters are less easily influenced by friends’ posts and less likely to be influenced by what candidates post.
Version
The work available for download here is the publisher version.
Publication Title
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Decision Sciences Institute
First Page
1918
Last Page
1932
Recommended Citation
Adler, W.D. & Adler, R.F. (2018). Tweets and posts: Social networking sites and political knowledge in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2018 Annual Meeting of the Decision Sciences Institute Proceedings (pp. 1918-1932). Chicago, IL: Decision Sciences Institute.