"Facebook and Twitter Will Try to Mobilize Millions of Voters Tomorrow"

Gracie Konopka

Tomorrow, November 2, 2010, are the Midterm Elections, and as usual people are doing all they can to try and increase the number of voters in the election. This year Facebook.com is trying to get involved in the effort to increase the number of voters. Facebook all day will have many reminders and posts about the Midterm election. They even created a new application that allows users to put in their location to find the closest polls near them. This is yet another effort to get young Americans to vote in these elections. Twitter is also trying to get their young users involved in the election as well, offering specific codes to tweet about their election. A lot of this information will be used by companies like CNN to help predict what will happen. These are two great campaigns that hopefully will lead to more voters getting involved.

Both of these campaigns by Twitter and Facebook are similar to the other previous attempts to get young voters involved, for example the “Rock the Vote” or “Vote or Die” campaigns. Both of these campaigns were not biased towards either candidate, but simply just trying to increase the number of voters. Coincidentally, the majority of the young voters that participated seemed to be more on the left side than the right. It is very likely that the same will occur with the young voters with this election as well. Does this mean that there is something wrong with the campaigns? Can anything be done to help change this trend? Honestly I do not what this means about the two campaigns to increase voter participation. I believe that the increase in voters is essential to have a fair election, but is the fairness of the election being compromised by have more people on the left side than the right.

There are several ways to try and help decrease the bias in the election I believe. Along with the effort to get people involved, these campaigns should offer information about each candidate to go with the information about how to vote. This should be a long term campaign for all of the companies trying to get involved in the efforts to increase participation. Facebook.com months ago could have posted information about what each candidate was working for. On the Rock the Vote website under the information tab the three main headlines are “Who Are Young Voters?” “How to Mobilize Young Voters,” “Young Voter Polling,” and “News from Rock the Vote.” Not one of the articles under the research tab even mentions who is running. Based off of this website I, a young voter, cannot tell who is even running. No, I do not believe that this is why young voters are leaning towards the left side, but I do believe that this website is not offering as much information as they could to help inform young voters. I do not think any of these campaigns to get people involved are negative, but I do think that in the future these campaigns could be greatly improved.

http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/11/01/01readwriteweb-facebook-and-twitter-will-try-to-mobilize-m-36492.html?ref=technology

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/US-Midterm-Elections-Only-Hours-Away-106492298.html

http://www.rockthevote.com/about/about-young-voters/