Social Pressure For Civic Duty
In the 2008 election, Facebook introduced a small button at the top of every user’s newsfeed that said “I voted” or “I’m a voter” and would show the user a count of how many other Facebook users clicked the button along with small thumbnail profile pictures of the voters. Facebook calls this its “Voter Megaphone” and is very clear about its intentions to increase voter turnout with the button. A research group did a study with Facebook’s voter megaphone in 2012 by showing some users that their friends voted and not showing others. The group found that 20% of users who saw their friends had voted also clicked that they had voted while only 18% of those who didn’t see their friends clicked the button. The group reasoned that positive social pressure had caused more people to vote, or at least tell their friends that they voted. The research group also examined voter records after the election and concluded that Facebook’s voter button increased turnout by 340,000 voters.
It was also recently revealed that not only did Facebook conduct social experiments with their very obvious voter button, but also influenced behavior by increasing the amount of news articles it showed users in the weeks leading up to the 2012 election. It didn’t promote political news articles any more significantly, but simply all news articles from a variety of sources. Researchers followed up with voluntary surveys for the users affected by this newsfeed tweak and found a statistically significant increase in how much attention users paid to the government. They also found that self-reported voter turnout increased by 3% with this tweak. Facebook has been less public about the newsfeed manipulation than their voter button experiments, most likely due to backlash over other recent social experiments they conducted, but the papers published concerning Facebook and the 2012 election are available online.
This all makes it seem like Facebook and its powerful network influence abilities are positive for society, in that they increase voter turnout. However, it is also somewhat concerning since Facebook has proven that it can target its influence to specific users and could theoretically influence the vote for one party or another. Facebook has enough data to figure out the political leanings of most of its users. With this information and ability to increase voter turnout, Facebook could theoretically increase turnout for a certain party or for certain issues. While increasing voter turnout is good, the unfair and powerful ability of Facebook as a political lobbying tool could be dangerous.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/can-voting-facebook-button-improve-voter-turnout
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/03/facebook-voter-experiment_n_6094690.html