Abstract:
Social media as a relatively new yet widely used means of sharing and encountering various kinds of information may work for or against the preparedness of the voting population of a country for election time. Social media is but one source of both potentially helpful information as well as disinformation relevant to elections and thus may be used to showcase how specific voting demographics may utilize it in preparation to vote. Semi-structured interviews were used to gather the perspective of first-time youth voters as a demographic of interest likely to use social media but may have more limited access to information pertinent to elections if living in impoverished conditions. Majority of the interviewees for the study had expressed fact-checking or further research into the content they encountered as their habits for using social media and had positive effects in influencing their decision-making in preparation for elections. The prevalence of fake-news and biased opinions on social media, however, had been a commonly mentioned factor in the interviewees’ seeing alternative sources of information as either more reliable or ideally used in combination with social media.
