How Does Social Media Affect The 2016 Election

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Media Impact on the Millennial Generation during 2016 Election
Social media is playing a huge role in this year’s 2016 presidential election by giving the candidates a place to campaign. Social media is a place where news media is discovered and candidates use this source to reach out and interact with the millennial generation. The presidential candidates are using a new strategy to target the millennials by campaigning on social media, knowing that the millennial generation is the ones who spend most of their time on the internet and uses this resource to get their information from (Graber, 2010).
“The 2008 campaign was unique in that it became the first national campaign in which traditional media such as television and newspapers were …show more content…

Not only do these networks help communicate with one another, but it is also a major aspect of the news media. This is a reason why online political behavior has grown within the past years (Preston, 2011). Internet conversations reported that “a total of 56% of the 2010 midterm election conversation took place online compared to only 19.3% of the election coverage conversation taking place via traditional media outlets” (Pearson, 2010). Social media also gives people the opportunity to share their voting experience by posting up a banner or picture saying “I voted”. By doing this, it’s a sign of advertisement and it motivates others to come together and join the group (Thompson, …show more content…

Twitter only takes 140 characters to damage a political campaign, because these technologies move so quickly, any remark can instantly be national news and read and shared by millions of people (Kucinich, 2011). Once the information is out, it may influence lots of people and they may view the candidates differently. During this year’s election, there’s been plenty of news that has gone viral which affected these candidates, such as Donald Trump’s leaked tape which captured Trump discussing women using lewd language. This video really affected Trump and the way people viewed him. Once the video went viral, it was hard not to come across it and women were very