WASHINGTON - THE number of Americans who follow the campaign for the White House on the Internet has more than doubled since 2000, with youngsters in particular ditching traditional media for the web, a poll showed on Friday.

Nearly one quarter of Americans - 24 per cent said - they regularly get news about the presidential campaign from the Internet, the poll conducted last month by the Washington-based Pew Research Center showed.

That was nearly three times the rate in 2000, when fewer than 10 per cent turned to the web for news of the presidential contest, and almost double the 13 percent who used the Internet as an information source during the campaign in 2004, the survey showed.

'With more young people going online for campaign information, the age gap in campaign news sources has widened. As was the case in 2004, older Americans are more likely than younger people to learn about the campaign from many traditional news sources,' the poll said.

Many of the young Americans who are ditching television as a source of campaign news are watching videos of campaign debates and speeches online, the poll showed.

'Roughly four-in-ten people under age 30 (41 per cent) have watched at least one form of campaign video online, compared with 20 per cent of those aged 30 and older,' the poll showed.

In another trend that confirmed the generation-information gap, 27 per cent of poll respondents under the age of 30 said they use social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook to garner information about the campaign.

That practice was rare among people in their 30s - four per cent visited social networking sites for campaign information - and practically nonexistent in the over-40 age group, where a mere one percent said they used the sites for political news. -- AFP

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