Social media, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, have become major battlegrounds in this year's elections. Candidates are using the platforms to identify and organize supporters and raise funds. They bypass traditional news media to send their messages unfiltered to the public. They target niche audiences with growing precision, contact hard-to-reach voters, extend their influence as online supporters forward their messages and carry out many campaign tasks at much lower cost than before. The increasing ability of campaign strategists to collect and analyze information about individual voters has raised privacy concerns, and many worry that the social networks' insular nature contributes to political polarization. But social media's low cost, ease of use and wide reach also raise hopes that they can level the campaign-spending playing field.

Tom Price is a Washington-based freelance journalist and CQ Researcher contributing writer. Previously he was a correspondent in the Cox Newspapers Washington Bureau and chief politics writer for the Dayton Daily News and The Journal Herald. His most recent book, written with former congressman and ambassador Tony Hall, is Changing The Face of Hunger: One Man's Story of How Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, and People of Faith Are Joining Forces to Help the Hungry, the Poor, and the Oppressed. He is the author of two Washington guidebooks, Washington, D.C., for Dummies, and the Irreverent Guide to Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Rolling Stone and other periodicals. He earned a bachelor of science in journalism at Ohio University.