Politics and Social Media

Social media has become more and more important in the role in political campaigns.  This was prevalent in the 2008 and 2012 elections. Candidates utilized social media to reach out to groups that not always has a high percentage of turnout voting rates.  http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2008/11/19/barack-obama-and-the-facebook-election Is an article that shows that Obama had gained much of his vote from the under 25 age group which is astounding seeing that not this was the highest percentage since exit polling began in 1976.  He reached out through using Facebook mainly.  A fact from this site said "Some 35 percent of Americans said they'd watched online political videos—three times as many as during the 2004 presidential election. And roughly 10 percent said they'd logged on to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to engage in the election." This just goes to show how we have evolved in the world and have put more emphasis on social media sites to get a point out into the world.  In a different article a source had said in the 2012 had utilized social media for the worse.  Candidates used social media sites to bash their opponents and post inappropriate adds about their counterpart.  So, the article had said that people will be pushing away from using social media in the next election if they know what is best for them or at least use it in a beneficial and publicly correct manor.  I believe that the social media sites put out a good representation of what a presidents stance may be or even give the public a chance to get to know them.  Twitter in this past election helped people put the presidential debates under a scope and have allowed us to move forward in understanding the presidential elections.  In 2016, I feel like the campaigns will still use sites as such to get the point across.