MySpace users tuned into Barack, finds internet poll

By Robin Meyers

Saturday, November 01, 2008

INTERNET-AGE users overwhelmingly back Barack Obama for US president, according to a poll at the world’s largest social networking website, MySpace.

Survey data collected during a year of unprecedented online political campaigning and discourse shows that 60% of the millions of eligible voters on MySpace prefer Democratic candidate Obama.

The survey, which has a 3% margin of error, shows that only 34% of MySpace users said they were likely to vote for Republican candidate John McCain.

MySpace reports having about 77 million active users, some 85% of whom are of legal voting age. Obama and McCain have MySpace profile pages used to convey their messages to online "friends".

"The next president of the United States has a MySpace profile," said MySpace political director Lee Brenner, "And they will continue to engage citizens of the United States through that profile."

MySpace polls show that 64% of its female users back Obama as compared with 31% favouring McCain.

Some 58% of the men using the News Corp-owned social networking website, which boasts a total of more than 100 million members, prefer Obama to 38% supporting McCain, according to the survey.

The younger the MySpace user the more likely he or she was to be pro-Obama, with his support rising from 53% of those 35 years of age or older to 62% of those between 18 and 24, results showed.

As with most of the country, MySpace users ranked the economy as their chief concern, followed by "the war on terror" and the environment.

"We find that the more people are engaged online the more they are actually engaged offline," Brenner told AFP.

"The more they go to news sites and social networks like MySpace, the more they go out and vote, knock on doors, give money to campaigns and take part in the political problem-solving process."

MySpace says that by working with Declare Yourself and Ultimate College Bowl campaigns it has helped get more that 300,000 people to register to vote in Tuesday’s US presidential election.

"No matter what happens, online presence is going to be a major part of campaign strategies from this point forward," Brenner said.

"This generation is more engaged and part of that comes from the idea that online social networking is all about creating communities and that is what politics is all about."

This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, November 01, 2008