• Internet Becoming America's Window to Politics

    Internet Becoming America's Window to Politics

    Techtree News Staff, Jun 16, 2008 1442 hrs IST

    The report found YouTube and other video Web sites having soared in popularity with 35 percent American adults having watched a political video online during the primary season.

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In its newest report, the Pew Internet and American Life Project has revealed that nearly 30 percent American adults used the Internet to read or watch "uncensored" campaign material, whether it be footage of debates or announcements or transcripts of speeches and so on.

The report found YouTube and other video Web sites having soared in popularity with 35 percent American adults having watched a political video online during the primary season. It found 10 percent of adults as having used social networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace for political activities. It found video- and social- networking to have increased since the last presidential election.

An interesting revelation: Pew found online fund-raising to have gone up to six percent as compared to just two percent in 2004. Democrat Barack Obama was found to be particularly good at raising funds online; Obama supporters were found twice as likely as those of Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican John McCain to have made an online contribution to the campaign.

To top it all, the Pew report found that though so many Americans were obviously using the Internet to get a bird's eye view of the campaign, as many as 60 percent did not trust the Internet fearing widespread misinformation and propaganda.

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Discussion Board
(1) Comments
herbert de turb
,rye, on Jun 16, 2008 05:10 PM
"fearing widespread misinformation & propaganda" -- that's hilarious, as if those 60 per cent were getting the truth from mainstream news media -- small wonder our nation's sliding ever deeper into the abyss as our glorified leaders distract our attention away from how they're printing dollars with abandon & how they let a certain foreign country set our foreign policy -- we can always count on those 60 per cent to panic whenever our leaders scaremonger in order to buttress their warmongering

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