Whatsapp and Facebook as a New Political Agora?

Abstract

This research tries to know how the political interaction of the citizens from the center of Ecuador is on the Internet. Every day more people use new technologies in order to learn about political issues. Virtual media allow different forms of citizen participation, making the traditional ones such as television, radio o written press to be obsolete. Through an online questionnaire, people were asked about the use of the political information in the different channels, and especially, about their participation in the last election campaign of 2017. The results show different patterns according to factors such as gender, age or occupation, confirming a panorama of transition between offline and online media. © 2018 IEEE.