Influence of social media on the Political Choice Making: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

In the last decade, there has been an enormous rise in the social media platforms. Social media has started influencing political choice making in various elections.The objective of the present study was to assess the impact of social media platforms in forming opinion about their political preferences. The study also aimed to examine the association between different demographic variables. Data was collected using Google forms. Hypothesis testing has been done to explore independence between various demographic variables. Further, binary logistic regression applied to find out the extent of influence of social media on political choice making among the respondents.Findings also revealed that there exists an association between many demographic variables like gender and voting frequency, gender and formation of political opinion from social media. It was additionally established that frequency of following social media platforms, trust in the news shared through social media platforms, activeness of political parties in using social media platforms, social media platforms circulate fake political news and optimism in current political climate drives political choice making.