Social Media-Youth Nexus: Analysis of Pakistan’s General Election 2018

This study has examined the impact of social media on Pakistan’s General Elections 2018 campaign. (i) To study the affect of social media on young voters during the general electoral campaign 2018. (ii) To explore the impact of social media on general election 2018 results. Moreover, this study analyzed social media usage of three major national political parties namely PTI, PML-N and PPP using social media. Social media platform globally not only used for sharing of the information on upcoming public gathering, rallies, and events but majorly for responding the propaganda, keeping their followers informed, debates on controversial issues and sharing of videos, photos and links.In this study, descriptive survey design is used. Keeping in mind immense size of young Pakistani voters for the 2018 election, we have targeted most of urban youth studying in universities or doing jobs. Convenience sampling is used to select sample of 156 respondents. A total of 240 questionnaires were distributed out of which 156 are used successfully for the analysis. Data is analyzed by computer software SPSS. Frequency distribution is used to analyze the results. The finding reveals that although political parties included social media into their campaigns, they are yet to exploit its full potential. Still Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf(PTI) ranked as most influential party in election 2018, as it used the social media for their aggressive promotion. Interestingly survey reveals that social media campaigns have “little or no effect” on matured respondents to getting them to the vote, while young voters especially who voted for the first time said they voted for the party they supported because of social media campaign. Further researches should be done in order to determine why social media was not able to increase the voter turnout.