Influence of Social Media on Voter Behaviour

Abstract

Social media, a 21th century platform and a tool to help nation and its societies to create, express, exchange their thoughts and ideas widely. People of all age group are fascinated to use and make this tool as any other media, to connect it to the world with lesser time and energy. Social media technology is wide enough to include blogging, picture-sharing, wall-posting, music-sharing, crowd sourcing and voice over IP, blogs etc, which today people are enjoying to utilize it to communicate with each other and also stimulate themselves to innovate more ideas and expressions. Social media, emerging as a hottest promotion tool during elections by the political parties to influence, connect and express their vision, objective to help them increase their visibility, or to gain majority. Today people live on social media, where even political parties want to reach out to hit them where they live. The purpose of writing this research paper is to understand the role social media plays in decision making of voters while they vote. The results of the study show that the social media have significant influence on voting decision especially young voters. The study also support that the remarks/tweets/comments by political leaders significantly influence their decision to vote for that party.

Populism à la Carte: The paradoxical political communication of Narendra Modi on Twitter

“…Social media platforms are taking their hold on the Indian masses at a relatively slow pace. Although their influence in mass media and political discourse has grown, the effective reach of these networks among the population remains limited, with only a third of all citizens accessing SM (Kumar, 2019). Furthermore, Twitter lags behind other SM outlets, with its growth tapering off around 20% after initial years of steady expansion.…”

“…Upper castes are twice as likely to have high or moderate exposure to SM as Dalits and tribals. Twenty-four per cent of women are likely to own a smartphone, compared with 41% of men (Kumar, 2019). Five per cent of those who studied up to matriculation are regular (every week) users of Twitter (contrary to 26% for Facebook and 33% for WhatsApp).…”

“…First, cross‐country comparisons tend to neglect geographical variations in platform usage (Pal & Gonawela, 2017). For example, in a country like the United States of America, 27.3% of the eligible population uses Twitter, while 2.2% of the Indian population—mostly educated, young, English‐speaking and urban professionals—is on Twitter (GDR, 2022a, 2022b; Kumar, 2019). Janus‐faced Twitter on one side is a popular media, and on the other is an expert‐first platform.…”