How Does Social Media Affect The 2008 Election

Ever since its conception, social media has been a vehicle to enable and mobilize citizens to participate in the political sphere. In 2008, Facebook boasted over 100 million users logging in at least once a day, a month before election day. Though social media is not new to politics, the 2008 election is the greatest example, because of Barack Obama’s implementation of SNS (Social Networking Sites) drove him straight to the white house. It would, in the end, be naive to believe that social media does not affect elections and the political landscape within the United States. In 2013 Juliet Carlisle and Robert Patton took Facebook users during the 2008 election, primary and general election to help understand the offline and online political participation. To do this, they addressed three questions: 1) “Which forms of online political participation offered by Facebook register the largest response... 2) How do traditional predictors of participation… regard to political participation on Facebook? 3) How does a Facebook user’s network size, relate to that user’s political participation” (Carlisle 2013. 886).

The expanded the pool of data by also measuring political engagement from the students Facebook profiles that are public. The independent variables included: parent’s income, political interest, and network sizes etc, while the control measures are sex, age, political ideology, and ethnicity. The dependent variable used was political activity on a scale of 0-12. There are two effects to note within the data, the first stage should represent college students as a whole, but the second stage could be affected by the narrowness of the set due to the Facebook profiles needing to be