MySpace Will Hold Presidential Primary
Michael Arrington

MySpace has more registered members than Mexico has people. If it was a country it would be the 11th largest in the world. So while it may be a major marketing event for MySpace to say it’s holding a presidential primary next January, you can be sure the candidates will take it seriously.

The MySpace primary will be held on January 1 & 2, 2008, before any of the official state primaries. Every user will be asked to vote for their favorite candidate.
Most of the candidates already have MySpace pages. See, for example, Hillary Clinton (7,468 friends), John Edwards (16,921 friends), Rudy Guiliani (private profile), John McCain (3,596 friends) and Barack Obama (89,465 friends). See all of the candidates here.
We recently covered an enhancement to John McCain’s MySpace page.

I actually think it would be much more interesting for Facebook to do this than MySpace. Facebook’s user accounts are each tied to an email address or cell phone, resulting in far fewer fake or duplicate accounts. Given the low quality of the MySpace user base (multiple accounts, no identity check, etc.) it would be relatively easy for a campaign to create a significant number of fake accounts to stuff the ballot box in their favor. Facebook can also tie their users to U.S. residency much easier than MySpace. The results would actually be interesting.

This story caught my eye earlier today.

Something that I say over and over is that I think it's pretty unbelievable that every child born in the 21st century has a very good chance of ending on up Facebook or MySpace. While I believe about 70%-80% of the United States has Internet access right now, we're not getting far from the point where a significant majority of the whole country could end up on a social networking site. Will we get to the point where you'll be able to see your neighbors on a social networking site so you can poke, message, and post a bulletin telling them to turn down "Leave" by JoJo on their alarm clock in the morning? Who knows! Is this scary? Perhaps.

Seeing as I would guess that USC likely has about a 70% Facebook penetration (a completely random guestimate), I agree with Arrington's thought that it might be more effective to have the election tie into Facebook, rather than MySpace. However, that's not to say that a "primary" via Facebook would be significantly more accurate than one on MySpace, now that Facebook has opened its doors to people who don't identify with a college, high school (boo), company (more boo), or even a geographic location (even worse). While it might be the layout of the website, Facebook seems to attract different types of users than MySpace on the surface (and seems to still have a largely college-educated base, which might skew the results a bit). Less flaming on people's "walls" (the equivalent to MySpace comments, which apparently can get pretty violent), more privacy features, and less overall raunchiness on the social network. However, I would venture to say that MySpace users are much more involved with their pages, likely stay on them for a longer period of time, and are generally more active within the more media-robust community (one day, I'll actually look into this).

I just mailed in my first voter registration sheet last Friday and I'm very excited to cast my first vote in the upcoming presidential election. I didn't register with a party, so I know that I have a lot to learn about the candidates. However, I look forward to getting involved with the democratic process (whether it matters or not in a state like California) and casting my first official ballot in 2008.

It remains to be seen whether the winner of the MySpace primary will end up winning the most exciting presidential election in years. As of right now, Barack Obama's camp seems to be hard at work on MySpace (are people "adding" him? Or is "he" "adding" people?) and will likely send out bulletin after bulletin as the e-Primary date approaches.

Before realizing how corrupt it could become, I always thought that giving people the opportunity to vote online would make more people want to vote. Albeit unofficial, it'll be very interesting to see how many people "cast their ballots," for the MySpace Primary.