Using Hyves, Twitter and Facebook in Politics

During the 2008 elections in the USA, a lot of youngsters voted in comparison to previous elections due to the use of Facebook by politicians. Obama was the king of social media. He gave young people the chance to participate and communicate actively. Besides this, Facebook was the ultimate way to reach thousands of young people. Dutch politicians thought: if Obama can do it, we can do it too. The most popular Dutch politicians on Twitter are Alexander Pechtold (D66) and Maxime Verhagen (CDA)(http://politiek.twittergids.nl). The most popular politician on Hyves are prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende (CDA) (http://jpb.hyves.nl)

Research have shown that the youth is sceptical about the populistic way politicians are trying to reach them. Today a special twitter and hyves debate is going on in order for politicians to keep up with the trend of social media. Both debates were a fiasco, it was impossible to have a debate going where it is only possible to type in not more than 140 characters on Twitter and on Hyves the messages were processed so slowly, that no one could follow what was actually said. Job Cohen (PvdA) even switched on his Caps Lock, which made all his comments come in capital.

It is known that youngster do not have many interest in politics. Only 20% of the Dutch youth says to have enough knowledge about Dutch politics and 25% of them thinks that politics have an actual influence on their daily life. Although a lot of young people are making use of social media, the question is if the use of social media by politicians is related to the voting behaviour of youngsters. My research has shown that when youngsters between 12 and 18 are using social media and are interested in politics they use social media as well in order to gain information about political issues. If they are not interested in politics but are using social media for personal activities, they will not use social media to gain information about politics and they will not be persuaded to do so as well. We can say that the use of social media by politicians in the Netherlands might have a slightly effect on the youngsters who already are interested in politics, but probably not as much as politicians would hope for.