In a survey by Yahoo! News, 5,188 registered voters weighed in with their thoughts on how social media impacts our perspectives on politics and activism. Yahoo plans to delve deep into the results of their survey tomorrow at the Digital Democracy conference, which will be live-streamed, but for the moment, here are the numbers: 74% of black respondents and 73% of Hispanic respondents said that they believe social media has “made political discussion more representative of what Americans really think.” The percentage of white and Asian respondents who agreed with that are a little lower, at 60% and 69% respectively.
As for whether social media might help surface the political influence of minorities, 55% black respondents marked in the affirmative, as did 51% of Hispanic respondents. For whites, the number is just 45%. (A statistic for Asian respondents is not included in The Daily Dot‘s coverage.)
Yahoo! elaborated on the results: “While voters overwhelmingly feel that social media and the Internet spread misinformation, the findings show that minority voters are especially likely to feel technology has made the American political debate more representative.”
Meanwhile, 57% white respondents said they felt that social media had increased negativity in politics, whereas only 41% of black respondents felt that way. Hmmm.
(via The Daily Dot, image via Twitter)
—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—
Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?
