Facebook – A Politician’s Newest Friend
With the upcoming election, politicians are actively seeking to increase their publicity and number of supporters. It seems like they are getting help. A study shows that Facebook and other social networking sites have helped generate about 340,000 additional votes during Election Day 2010. When logging into Facebook on Election Day, there were multiple reminders that it was Election Day. Although most of us probably ignored the message, it helped generate 60,000 votes from friends directly connected with each other and 280,000 votes from friends of friends. Surprisingly, only 4 percent of the people who claimed to have voted were lying.
This article shows that social networks, or the online world, can directly affect the real world. As the article states, strong ties are more likely to influence one’s actions than weak ties are. 340,000 more votes were influenced as a result of a social network. To visualize this “domino effect”, we can think about the social network of Facebook, with each user being a node. In between nodes, an “S” can indicate a strong tie and a “W” can indicate a weak one. Every one of the 340,000 users is in the same large component because they have been influenced by some other user in the component. When showed that friends were voting, a user would have more reason to go out and vote, and as a result, press the button to claim he/she voted. Even friends of friends saw the message and were thus influenced to vote. This, as the researchers claim, is a “social contagion.” This shows how each node in a large component has the ability, indirectly, to reach and influence even the most distant nodes, regardless of the intermediaries. Facebook has had a huge impact in past elections and its exponential growth will indubitably contribute even greater in the upcoming 2012 election.