Newswise — Paul Brewer, director of the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication, recently conducted research on Facebook comments' influence on voters.
The team found that when Facebook users see favorable comments on the social media site about a political candidate, those opinions positively influence their own views of the politician, while unfavorable comments have a negative effect, according to a new paper by University of Delaware researchers.
That influence occurred even though the research participants weren’t Facebook friends or even acquaintances of the commenters.
The research team, consisting of faculty and students from the departments of Communication and of Political Science and International Relations, created a Facebook page for a fictitious candidate using general and nonpartisan “information” about him.
The research, published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science, found that those who saw positive comments or “likes” had a more favorable perception of the candidate and were more likely to support him, while those who saw the negative comments had more unfavorable perceptions.
Whether the candidate responded to the comments had no effect on how he was perceived.
“This showed that people trust comments from their peers more than they trust self-generated comments from the candidate,” Brewer said.
Brewer said the study is a first step in researching the effect of social media interactivity in political campaigns.
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