Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Advancing Democracy One Tweet At A Time, Landon T. Hester

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis takes a broad look how citizens use social media to foster political discussion, enhance political knowledge and engage in political participation in the United States. In this study, democracy is broken down into three empirically measurable components: political discussion, knowledge and participation. To begin, I provide an in-­‐depth review of past research examining the impact social media has on each element of democracy. In addition, I analyze data collected from a novel social media panel of 3,811 Twitter users by researchers from Louisiana State University (Davis et. al, 2017). From this, I measure the impact that Facebook and …