Facebook, Twitter: Everything that is being posted and sent here, could soon decide who is going to win the next election in the United States. At least this is what the media expert Dave Karpf from the George Washington University in Washington D.C. claims: “Facebook is the place where we can, nowadays, find and consume most of the news. That doesn’t mean that it replaces journalists and traditional news, but it works as a filter: Instead of flicking through the newspaper or TV, we click ourselves through our Facebook wall.” Television is stretched to its limit. A new study of the US polling institute Pew suggests something similar: According to them, every third voter of these year’s congress election received his or her information about the candidates or their electoral program from their smartphone and every sixth voter exclusively from social network platforms. At first, this may does not seem that spectacular, but compared to the congress election four years ago the numbers have doubled. An article on Twitter, a television commercial on Facebook – With those new ways of receiving news, social media could soon become more important than television, according to media expert Karpf in the Ö1- interview. Many viewers watch only specific shows on television, series and other programs are mostly being watched on the Internet, where there aren’t any commercial. “Democrats and Republicans use Facebook. On Facebook, which is being used by almost 180 Million people, you can find advertisement, and this type of advertisement is more targeted than ever before.” Not only do young voter use Facebook, but also parents and grandparents. Karpf says: “The big challenge ten years ago was to optimize the political content for search engines such as Google so that the content appears right at the top of our list of results. Right now it’s about being “liked”, “shared” or “sent forward” on Facebook. The message has to arouse a certain amount of curiosity and interest in order to be spread by many users on social networks.” Every fourth person receives news from smartphones. Every fourth US citizen above the age of sixteen receives information exclusively from his or her smartphone – with an upward tendency. Experts agree that whoever penetrates the Internet market most successfully could be the one moving into the White House in 2016.