How Facebook manipulated the voter turnout, and more…

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November 4, 2014 at 6:57 pm #816046

PangolinPie
Participant

I found this fascinating.

http://www.vox.com/2014/11/4/7154641/midterm-elections-2014-voted-facebook-friends-vote-polls

If you’re on Facebook, you may be seeing the little “I Voted” sticker today; either you or your friends may have clicked on it to indicated that you did your civic duty. But there’s a deeper reason that the little icon may have showed up in your newsfeed; Facebook did a smaller-scale version of this experiment (because that’s what it is) in 2010, and they claim that significantly higher numbers of people voted or said they voted because they saw that their FB friends had voted.

Now I’m sure a lot of people will see this as sinister manipulation, and in a way it is, but is it bad to get more people to vote? Some people might point to the fact that Facebook users lean demographically liberal: more women, younger and more urban. Personally, that’s who I like to see voting, but I can see it being an issue for Republicans.

Also, what other behaviors can Facebook and other mega-sites manipulate? It’s all very interesting.

There’s more in-depth info about this experiment here:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/can-voting-facebook-button-improve-voter-turnout

And if you like this sort of thing I recommend the book “Dataclysm” by one of the founders of OKCupid. Lots of fascinating info about large-scale harvesting of data and its uses.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00J1IQUX8?btkr=1

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November 4, 2014 at 10:31 pm #819002

trickycoolj
Participant

Google’s doodle today also shows its US Election Day and when you click on it you can put in your address to find your assigned polling place. Even for us all absentee voters it showed all our drop off stations! Quite helpful.

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November 5, 2014 at 1:18 am #819003

JoB
Participant

if facebook managed to manipulate it’s readers to get more of them to vote..

i’m all for it…

i have been working at it for months now ;-)

wait.. maybe it was my endless facebook posts that tipped the scales…

ROFLOL at anyone who will believe that..

only in my dreams am i THAT powerful :)

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