Nearly one quarter of Americans -- 24 percent -- 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 percent 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.

Youngsters aged 18 to 29 were defecting to the Internet in the greatest number, with 42 percent saying the worldwide web was one of their primary sources for news from this year's campaign compared with 20 percent four years ago.

"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 percent) have watched at least one form of campaign video online, compared with 20 percent of those aged 30 and older," the poll showed.

In another trend that confirmed the generation-information gap, 27 percent 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 percent 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.