Tweets and Posts: Social Networking Sites and Political Knowledge in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

To what extent does a political candidate’s social media presence influence people’s views and their real-world political activities? We conducted a survey using Mechanical Turk asking questions about social networking use and political involvement with regard to the 2016 presidential election. We asked factual questions about politics to gauge political knowledge. We find low-information voters are more easily influenced by friends’ posts and are more likely to be influenced by candidates’ social media to change real-world political activities; in contrast, high-information voters are less easily influenced by friends’ posts and less likely to be influenced by what candidates post