Facebook is taking some heat for its possible political biases, but college students may not be noticing, according to George Mason University research.
Traditionally political issues including gay marriage, abortion and legalization of marijuana simply aren’t seen as part of politics by many college students, said Emily Vraga, a professor in George Mason’s Department of Communication who studies social media. Instead, college students view many political topics as social issues.
“Young people are really active in social issues,” Vraga said. “But they don’t want to be involved in “Big P” politics. Politics is horrible. Politics is people fighting. Politics is intolerant. But social issues don’t fit that rubric.”
Vraga looked at how young adults define Facebook posts in her study “Blurred lines: Defining social, news, and political posts on Facebook.”
Vraga and her team made a simulated Facebook feed and asked students to define the posts as political, news or social. The 78 participants were young adults with an average age of 21.48 years; 61.4 percent were female and 38.6 percent were male; 47.8 percent said they were Democrat, 31.9 percent were Republican and 20.3 percent were independent.
For each post, participants were asked to pick the description that best described the purpose of the post: whether it was primarily focused on political information or opinion, news and current affairs (nonpolitical), personal stories and updates, or “other.”
Questions to participants included how much they enjoyed the content of the post and its political orientation.
“The big surprise was there was so little agreement about what was news,” said Vraga, adding participants were overwhelmingly unified when a post was purely political. Participants listed hot-button political topics as news or social posts, not political ones, unless they were tied to a candidate.
The distinction between social and news posts became fuzzy. A road closure might seem to be straightforward, hard news, but when the post was combined with a photo and link, the additions seemed to soften the news angle for the study participants, who were then more likely to label the post as social sharing.
Vraga also has studied how today’s young adults perceive disagreement on Facebook and their willingness to share political information themselves. She finds that while many young adults may shy away from explicitly political topics, they are more willing to be engaged with social causes.
“This social activism helps them figure out who they are, and that they are, in fact, political,” Vraga said.