All eyes will be on Barack Obama and Mitt Romney during tonight's presidential debate -- specifically, on the factual nature of their arguments.
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MTV, for one, will be partnering with FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan research organization, to monitor the debate in real time via Twitter. The partnership is a branch off of Power of 12 -- an existing MTV effort to increase young voter participation.
"We think that there's a great opportunity to make sure our audience has the right information to come to an informed conclusion of who they want to vote for," Jason Rzepka, senior vice president of public affairs at MTV, tells Mashable. "There are 45 million Millenials who are registered to vote this year; that actually makes them the biggest voting block in the country. So they really have a lot of power at their disposal."
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Rzepka says the majority of @MTV's 5.6 million Twitter followers are young -- many of whom are voting for the first time.
FactCheck has prepared about 30 statements on tonight's topic of domestic policy. The moment an issue comes up in the debate, then, MTV will tweet a link to the Power of 12 Tumblr page. There, an in-depth explanation of the subject will be available, as well as a link to FactCheck's site -- a way to "put everything in context" and get as much information as possible, Rzepka says.
"A lot of our audience are two-screeners," he says. "They're watching TV but also consuming info on TweetDeck. To have this as a companion experience to the debate, we think, can be really helpful for young voters -- especially if it's a topic they're unsure about."
MTV won't be the only ones fact-checking tonight. Both the Obama and Romney campaigns launched micro sites to monitor each other during the debate.
Will you be partaking? Let us know in the comments.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Gage Skidmore.
This story originally published on Mashable here.