Politicians poised to campaign on Facebook

Students visiting Facebook.com to rev up their social lives this fall might find the popular site more active than ever.

Starting in September, politicians will be able to purchase Facebook accounts that will allow them to advertise, maintain groups for supporters and campaign for elections.

With roughly 8 million members, Facebook is viewed as a potential way of courting college -- and now high school -- voters, who traditionally vote in lower numbers than adults.

But some students think that opening Facebook to the world of politics will only cause annoyance.

College senior Tejas Patil said that he is unhappy about politicians joining Facebook.

"I think that is the most annoying thing that Facebook could probably do," Patil said. "I would hate any messages that politicians would send me."

Second-year Fine Arts graduate student Orlando Soria, however, argued that politicians joining Facebook might not be a bad thing.

"I don't feel like it is that awful," he said. "Look at MySpace. How many annoying people are on there trying to be your friend?"

Melanie Deitch, Facebook's director of marketing, said that the site's goal is to offer fair marketing to every politician and social cause and downplayed the coming changes.

"There is really no change in terms of opening this up to politicians," she said. "To date, politicians can campaign on Facebook and in local elections have actually done that."

Currently, Facebook sells advertising space to companies from Verizon Communications Inc. to E-Trade Financial Corp. The new deal will allow politicians to purchase similar advertisement space and create profiles from which they can message students across the country.

But that move has some students irked that Facebook is abandoning its original purpose of enhancing college students' social interactions.

"I already think that Facebook has exceeded what its original premise was, which is to connect college kids," Patil said. "I was not too thrilled when they opened Facebook to high schools, and now I'll be even less thrilled" about opening it to politicians.

One possible outcome of making the social network more political is increased voter turnout among college and high school students, but students are split onto whether that will actually happen.

"Of all the sponsored profiles they could put on there, politicians are probably the best," Soria said. "Campuses are so apathetic that using Facebook for politicians could be good for getting kids to vote."

But Patil believes otherwise.

"Politicians on Facebook will affect youth voting rates in the same way that spam e-mail gets you to buy Viagra," he said.

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