Relationship Among Social Media Uses, Internet Mediation and Political Participation in Pakistan

Abstract

Purpose of the study: This study explores the relationship between internet connectivity, social media usage, and political participation. Besides, assess the connection between political participation and vote casting behaviour on social media.
 Methodology: The researchers used the Uses and Gratification theory and adopted a quantitative method to collect people's views. A designed questionnaire disseminates among 375 male and female Gujrat and Chi-Square analyses conducted on respondents' data.
 Main Findings: The study's demographic findings reveal that most of the respondents belong to age 18-30 with BA/MA education. Students with single marital status use Facebook most of the time to get political information. The study results reveal that those who use social media platforms actively participate in political activities.
 Applications of this study: Pakistani people frequently use social media applications like Facebook and Twitter daily to discuss political information. Active social media participants play an important role in political activities and provoke others to participate in the voting process.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: Investigating the function of information technology in political practice will reinforce new democratic processes in economically developing countries such as Pakistan. The democratic system in Pakistan is not robust. Social media is experimenting with voter self-promotion and mobilisation to influence voters to change power dynamics in a politically motivated way.

Savvy and woke: Gender, digital profile, social media competence, and political participation in gender issues among young Filipino netizens

“…Access to tangible digital tools is a prerequisite to maximizing the affordances of social media to facilitate political participation. We coined these prerequisites to SMPP as digital profile , which includes having active accounts on one or more social media sites (Effing et al, 2011 ; Abdu et al, 2017 ; Albu and Etter, 2018 ), ownership of one or more gadgets (Schradie, 2011 ; Kim et al, 2016 ; Lin and Chiang, 2017 ), and internet connection (Wang et al, 2018 ; Shehzad et al, 2021 ). For the second research objective of the study, we will determine how the respondents' digital profile influences their SMPP-GI.…”

“…A wealth of research has indicated the positive influence of social media use on political participation (Dimitrova and Bystrom, 2013 ; Kim and Khang, 2014 ; Boulianne, 2015 ; Lee and Xenos, 2020 ), especially among the youth (Ida and Saud, 2020 ). In terms of focus and context of SMPP, studies have examined generalized forms of online political participation (Shehzad et al, 2021 ), and specific issues such as election (Dimitrova and Bystrom, 2013 ; Yang and DeHart, 2016 ), racism (Ince et al, 2017 ) and gender inequality (Quan-Haase et al, 2021 ).…”

Impact of Facebook Usage on the Political Participation among Women in Pakistan

“…Firstly, it raised people's interest and participation, and secondly, it reduced the direct and indirect communication gap between people and government (Balo & Shawon, 2018). People around the world use social networking applications such as Facebook to get the latest political news and information, which convert young voters into loyal voters (Somaiah, 2018), expanding access to social media increases political participation (Shehzad et al, 2021), active users of social networking sites are active participants of offline political activities, Political parties, candidates and political workers motivate voters to win elections, to enhance the legislative process and influence government policies (Aleyomi & Olanrewaju, 2014).…”