Politik på Facebook : En studie om högskolestudenters intresse för politik på Facebook

Sammanfattning: The quick development of social media and their increased number of users, amongst mainly young adults, means that a lot of the university students of today are present there. During the last years, Facebook has developed into a political venue, where politicians, parties and other organizations are spreading their political messages. The main focus of this study will be to examine what makes university students click/ignore political content in their Facebook feed. The purpose of this study is to examine university students’ attitudes and their behaviours towards political content on Facebook. Since they, statistically, are a group of people that use Facebook in a great extension and since social media is a quite young phenomena, it is of great interest to find out reasons for interest/disinterest concerning political content on Facebook. A quantitative survey was conducted with 67 university students from KTH with the purpose of gathering raw data. We complemented the survey with a qualitative study that went on for three days. The results from our studies show that there are several reasons why university students choose to click/ignore a link with political content. From these results we have identified and focused on the most recurring reasons to what causes that leads to interest/disinterest for political links. We have come to the conclusion that the students foremost click on a link with political content when they have some sort of self-interest in the political content of the link. Furthermore, they also click when they have a relation to the political subject, are interested in a specific politic issue, have a will to understand other political perspectives (than their own) and when they have a will to simply keep themselves updated. The differences between these reasons, which are closely related, are explained furthermore in the discussion part. The main reasons to why they choose to ignore political content in their Facebook feeds are; trouble relating to the political subject, no interest for politics and scepticism towards the information source.