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Facebook and politics
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story Lindsay Funston & Kamran Rouzpay | illustration Kelly Walker
University of Oregon junior Aaron Polk uses the click of a mouse and a Facebook account to support presidential hopeful Senator John McCain in this year’s election. Boasting more than forty-two thousand members, Polk’s boldly titled Facebook group, “Stop Barack Obama (One Million Strong and Growing)” leads Facebook’s anti-Obama outlets. “Facebook is heavily used by young people, and the majority of Obama supporters are young people,” says Polk. “I figured a lot of people support him for the wrong reasons. It’s an Obama awareness group, but an anti-one.”
Polk is one student politico striving to educate his Facebook peers and, when November election time comes, offset their left-leaning voting traditions. As the presidential election nears, Generation Y is using Facebook as an online forum to organize rallies and protests and to debate with peers. Founded in 2004 and touting seventy million users worldwide (twenty-seven million in the United States), the social networking site has become youth’s new grassroots leader. Democrats first tapped the online social networking scene in 2004, when Howard Dean realized how rapidly his campaign staff could rally supporters. This year, campaigning via Facebook is common practice. More than 1.25 million users have added the ABC News U.S. Politics application since it was implemented in the 2006 mid-term elections, allowing users to read, watch, debate, and participate in political discussion.
Obama’s hugely successful Facebook campaign has garnered him more than eight hundred thousand supporters on the site, roughly six times the amount of either Senator Hillary Clinton or John McCain. As a young Republican, Polk pits himself against the majority of his peers. “I try to show people ‘I’m young and I’m conservative.’ It’s a challenge. I hear a lot of irrational arguments.” Polk, whose inbox is regularly filled with hate mail, attracts pro- and anti-Obama students who engage in often-heated debates on his group’s discussion board. “I caught myself in one that put me behind studying for days,” he says.
Facebook’s political presence has the market power to send more young voters to the polls in November than the 2004 presidential election, which saw the largest turnout of under-thirty voters in the last decade thanks to organizations like Rock the Vote.
Prior to Obama’s March 21 visit to UO’s McArthur Court, Facebook invitations were sent to roughly four thousand local users. The bombardment of notifications had college voters lining up as early as fourteen hours before the speech.
Though Polk’s membership grows by about nine hundred members per day — expanding from one thousand to more than forty thousand members in just five months — he recognizes that his Facebook efforts ultimately offer a place for college students to be engaged in politics. “I wish [college students] would look top to bottom at all the issues,” says Polk. “At the end of the day, whether people are voting Libertarian, Republican, or Democrat, if they’re voting, then it puts a smile on my face.”