Social media may play larger role in future elections

OREM — In the 2008 election, President Barack Obama used several social media outlets to his advantage.

Following the president's win, Utah Valley University communications professor Matt Kushin believed young voters were swayed to vote thanks to increasingly popular media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Turns out Kushin was wrong. More recent research found young voters visited some pretty traditional websites at the time, instead of just gleaning from social media sites.

"(They went to) your news website, your newspaper website and the candidate's website even more so than newspapers and television, and even more so than social media," Kushin said.

He believes that's because people were still getting comfortable with social media websites in 2008, especially involving an election campaign.

"The Internet took a lot of election cycles before people could rely on it for information," Kushin said.

Candidates shouldn't give up on social media in upcoming elections, he added. Attitudes will change.

"We have yet to see what it will do in 2010 and in future elections," he said, "and I think using and getting used to these media formats will help candidates reach their constituents."

Kushin and another colleague plan to do a follow-up study after the 2010 election to see if attitudes have changed. They also want to find out if social media has some negative political variables.

— Cleon Wall