-By Warner Todd Huston
A new study by the Pew Research Center finds that two thirds of social media users are also active in politics.
The study found that 66 percent of adult social media users (which is 39 percent of all U.S. adults) had promoted political or socio-political issues and one third used their social media to post their own opinions and to share content about political matters.
35 percent used their social media to urge others to vote and 28 percent have used tools to to post links to stories or articles on politics. Pew found that the conservative and liberal social media users were most apt to do the latter.
Republican social media users were more likely to use their social media to link to politicians and candidates and to re-share content they found from friends while Democrats were more likely to share links to political articles.
But, even as Pew found conservative and liberals had slightly different behaviors, they were still all very close margins. Pew’s numbers rarely differed by 5 percentage points either way showing that both liberals and conservatives had pretty similar behavior on social media.
Pew surveyed 2,253 adults over 18 years of age for the study.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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