Social networking sites and politics

This is proof that social network sites are significantly used for political reasons, and former offenders are being cut off from this political discussion when they are denied access to social network sites by state or federal laws. A chilling effect!

February 2012:

Chatter in people’s social networks about political issues prompts a share of disagreements among friends and the sites yield surprising revelations about people’s views; 18% of users have shunned “friends” who have different ideas and 16% have found friends whose beliefs match their own.

Main Findings:
Social networking sites have become places where political conversation, debate, and proselytizing occur, especially during campaign seasons. These new arenas of political discussion have drawn attention among political activists and have been a major focus of activity particularly since the campaign of Barack Obama aggressively embraced them in the 2008 presidential campaign. At the same time, some analysts have expressed concerns about the impact of social networking sites on the broad political culture. They have worried that on SNS users might customize their friendship networks by hanging out only with people who share and reinforce their political views.

A new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project posed a series of questions about people’s general use of SNS for politics and about the ways in which they interact with friends on the sites over political material. One goal of the survey was to see if people are using the sites in a way that suggests they live in social network “echo chambers” of like-minded friends.

Overall, the new survey found that 80% of American adults use the internet and 66% of those online adults participate in social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+. That amounts to more than half of the entire U.S. population who are SNS users. When it comes to SNS users, the internet users who describe their political ideology as moderate or liberal are more likely than conservatives to use social networking sites: 74% of internet users who describe themselves as liberal use SNS and 70% of internet users who are moderate are SNS users – that compares with 60% of conservative internet users who are SNS users. The chart below shows what proportion of the entire population – not just internet users – fall into these categories.

..For the remainder of this research: by Pew Center