Strong and Weak Ties influencing Facebook Voters
A study was conducted by the scientists from Facebook and the University of California, San Diego using millions of Facebook users on Election Day 2010. On Election Day, nearly every Facebook user who signed on received a “get out the vote” message, which included a reminder that it was a election day, a link to polling places, and option to click an “I Voted” button that displayed the total number of Facebook users that had reported voting, and up to 6 pictures of the member’s friends who had reported voting. Two randomly chosen control groups of 600000 members did not receive the pictures. One of them only received the “get out the vote” message, and the other did not receive any voting message. Based on this study, the researchers determined the message showing friends who had votes was directly responsible for 60000 more votes nationwide by friends and indirectly responsible for 280000 more votes by friends of friends. The voting study showed that influential patterns were more likely to between close friends, which indicates “strong ties” rather than “weak ties.” More interestingly, the researchers found that friends of friends were influenced as well. Additionally, about 4 percent of those who claimed they voted were not telling the truth.
This is very interesting from a networks perspective. It would be expected that as the study suggests influential patterns were more likely to occur between strong ties than weak ties. You would be more likely to vote or take other such action if you discovered that 6 of your close friends had voted than if some distant friendships who you may not have communicated with in a while had voted, especially if voting and political activism was somehow important in your social circle. It also makes sense that even the more distant friendships would influence voting patterns (just not as much as closer friendships.) The bit about the people who were lying about voting actually further proves this point. It was so important for their strong and weak friends to know that they had voted that they were willing to lie about it.
What was more interesting was the information the researchers discovered about the friends of friends. The article does not specify if these friendships were strong or weak, but presuming that they were strong, this could be somewhat of an extension of the strong triadic closure property. According to this study, the fact that someone’s close friend A’s close friend B had voted was enough to influence that person to vote. In a way, this makes sense. The strong triadic closure property states that if a person has strong ties to two other people, there should at least be a weak tie between the latter two. This indicates that person voting and person B in the above scenario have at least a weak tie between them and know of each other (even if they are not actually friends on Facebook.) This tie just like the other strong and weak ties in this study was influential in getting Facebook users to get out and vote.
Now, if only such a thing existed for reminding people to get their absentee ballots.
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/us/politics/social-networks-affect-voter-turnout-study-finds.html
–KitKat