October 2012

Americans are following the presidential campaign more closely on nearly every news platform than they were earlier in the year, including print newspapers. The biggest gains have come on the internet-both to the websites of traditional news sources and those native to the web.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are growing especially rapidly as a source of political news. The number of Americans who say they regularly go to these destinations to learn about the campaign has doubled since January. Even with that jump, however, these leading social media platforms are still turned to by a relatively limited number of Americans, about 17% in all, when those who mentioned at least one of those platforms are combined.

13% of all adults have made a contribution to one of the presidential candidates in this year’s election. Offline methods (such as donating in person or via regular mail) remain the most common way that Americans contribute to political campaigns, but that online contributions represent a significant portion of the total. At the moment, donations directly from cell phones make up only a small component of the political giving universe.

Among the 13% of adults who have donated to one of the presidential candidates in this year’s election:

• 67% donated in person, over the telephone, or through the mail
• 50% donated online or via email
• 10% donated by sending a text message from their cell phone or using a cell phone app

Put another way, that works out to just 1% of all American adults who have made a presidential contribution directly from their cell phone this election season. By way of comparison, prior Pew Internet research has found that roughly one in ten American adults have made a charitable donation of any kind using the text messaging feature on their cell phone.

CBS chief research officer Dave Poltrack says a video-on-demand system -- where commercials could be replaced every three days, and the ads could not be fast-forwarded through -- is a long-term solution that could work for both the networks and advertisers as an alternative to DVR viewing.

The Obama Administration came under fire after Reuters and Fox News reported that internal State Department e-mails revealed that an Islamic militant group immediately claimed responsibility for the Benghazi attacks on social media platforms, but Sec of State Hillary Clinton fired back saying U.S. intelligence isn't based on random Facebook posts.

"Posting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence," Sec Clinton said. "I think it just underscores how fluid the reporting was at the time and continued for some time to be." She insisted that time was needed to parse out the conflicting evidence related to the Benghazi attack. "The independent accountability review board is already hard at work looking at everything, not cherry picking one story here or one document there, but looking at everything - which I highly recommend as the appropriate approach for something as complex as an attack like this," she said.