Today as I continuously sift through all of the web's 2012 election information, I only find myself more and more undecided as to which presidential candidate is going to win. One journalist/expert/friend says that Romney has the election without a doubt, but then another says that Obama is for sure going to get reelected. I have no idea which candidate is actually going to win, but I do know that all of the social networks (journalists/experts/friends) are going to have a huge impact on how people vote.
I stumbled across the article, "What are your election predictions?" on CNN.com throughout which "experts" opinions of the presidential race tweets are discussed. These so called experts are tweeting their predictions as to whether Romney or Obama will win and I think this is going to greatly affect voters' decisions. Even though the tweeters aren't providing much evidence as to why one candidate is going to win rather than the other, viewers of these tweets might make their decisions solely based on these tweets.
Also, I think that these tweets might cause some individuals not to vote while giving others more motivation to vote. For example, if someone planned to vote for Obama, but then sees an experts prediction that Obama is going to win easily then that individual might think "Well, then I guess my vote doesn't really matter" and choose not to vote at all. In contrast, someone voting for Romney that sees this same prediction might become that much more motivated to get out and vote to be sure that Romney wins instead of Obama.
Twitter is not the only social media that will affect voters' decisions and experts' tweets are not the only ones that will be looked viewed. Voters will look to friends, celebrities, journalists, peers, etc. and their posts to sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger in order to decide whether they should vote for Obama, Romney, or other presidential candidates.
The only advice I can give is to not believe everything you read, but to view information critically and vote based on how you feel, rather than on what others believe.
One thing that might interfere with the critical judgements of certain people would be these "mock accounts" on Twitter. Now of course most of the general public, informed or not, should not be fooled by these accounts, but some definitely will be, and that could do some damage. Mock accounts aside, there are literally hundreds of accounts on Twitter claiming to be the president so how can a non-tech-savvy and informed individual know the difference? This swarm of accounts could ultimately influence these peoples' decisions, and that is why I think Twitter might not be the BEST way for people to get their political info. That and of course you have a multitude of different people giving their own opinions so it's a jungle out there!
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ReplyDeleteThis was one of the problems I thought about with the Five Thirty Eight blog and election predictions. Nate Silver has devised a way to predict the outcome of the presidential election down to the state. This is really exciting, but I don't think it will change sentiment among Fox News or MSNBC reporters. If the far left or far right news media outlets just accepted the predictions (regardless of how credible it is), some of their viewers may become disheartened enough to not put in the effort of even voting. While they sometimes sound silly with their firm standing on who will win, they are also stuck in that position for their viewers; at least until all the polls are closed.
ReplyDeleteSteve, that's a very interesting point! We tend to forget that just because someone claims to be a specific person (like Obama) that doesn't mean they are actually that person. However, a lot of times we forget to critically surf the web and take things to be literal. I wonder if/how these scam tweeters affected voting this year.
ReplyDeleteEmily, that is another great example of what I'm talking about! I thought the same thing and wonder how many people were possibly swayed to not vote simply because they saw Nate Silver's predictions and figured they didn't need to vote since it was already sort of decided.