Facebook joins political fray
In what is looking to be a rather interesting development, Facebook is turning out to be an online recruiting tool for supporting Barak Obama, which could also spell future online campaigns for other candidates. In effect, FaceBook could potentially serve as a college-focused MoveOn.org.The gathering of several thousand students at George Mason University in Fairfax underscored the potential power of online communities in the 2008 campaign. Its genesis was a group created last summer on Facebook.com, a Web site frequented by college students who post profiles and assemble virtually.What is interesting about this movement is that it is college-centered, with a potential to energize a vast body of students who might otherwise remain non-committal toward politics. Even better, since college students generally harbour a certain, shall we say, antipathy towards the Republican/conservative mindset, this development will not be viewed happily by the GOP or any of their various agents, especially the college-crusading Trotskyite cum right wing loon, David Horowitz. They might not think or even consider the potential yet, but if this does pick up steam, I see FaceBook campaign legislation ahead....
Barack Obama for President in 2008 now has more than 50,000 members, and its founders have created an offline presidential draft committee, Students for Barack Obama.
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Another Facebook group, Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack), was started less than three weeks ago and has already recruited 200,000 members. ...
posted by theBhc at 12:04 AM
2 Comments:
I am not so sure college students are so liberal anymore, if they ever were. I recall reading a few stats on college students supporting Bush and if Daugher's friends are any indication, then they either don't vote or vote Republican. Also, there was a line in the I.F. Stone biography "All Governments Lie" that mentioned students were generally conservative.
Liberalism on college campuses may indeed be less than is generally imagined. But regardless of the reality of this, it is believed by the GOP that college students vote overwhelmingly liberal, i.e., non-Republican. This is why the GOP targets voter suppression tactics at liberal arts colleges in crucial swing states, while blessing the voting privileges of religiously based universities. An example of this was seen in Ohio in 2004, where Kenyon and Oberlin College students stood in line in the rain for hours, waiting to vote on a clearly inadequate number of voting machines:
At Kenyon College and Oberlin College, liberal arts institutions, there were severe shortages of voting machines when compared with nearby religious-affiliated schools.
Clearly, the GOP was not at all confident that a conservative tilt exists on campuses such as these.
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