Facebook gets results? 2010 vote experiment worked, scientists say.

The party-neutral, go-vote cues appear to have appealed to self-identified liberals and conservatives in equal measure.

This is not the first instance in which Facebook has posted nonpartisan Vote messages on users' news feeds. But it is the first time the service's effort has been harnessed to see what sort of effect online networking services may have in turning those missives into action.

Of the 61,279,316 randomly-selected Facebook users included in the study, 98 percent received an information block on their news feed that had five features: a simple "Vote" logo, a link to a list of polling places, an "I voted" button, a counter tallying the total number of Facebook users who indicated they had voted, and a row of images of "close" friends who indicated that they had voted.

The remaining users were divided into two groups: one whose news feed displayed everything the large group saw – except the friends' photos; and a group that received no get-out-the-vote message at all.

Although tens of millions of users were participating in the experiment without their knowledge, the researchers say they went to great lengths to protect Facebook users' privacy – something on which Facebook insisted, Fowler said.

The team found that the news-feed message without the faces triggered millions of acts where people engaged in some form of online political communication or sought more information. But the people most likely to head for the polls were people who saw the faces of friends who had voted.

The team estimates that perhaps 60,000 voters were directly affected by the message, but "social contagion" via links with friends, and even friends of friends, led to another 280,000 voters casting ballots that day that otherwise wouldn't have voted.

The next step in testing the power of online social networks to trigger large-scale changes in social behavior is to see what types of messages are the most effective and what sorts of people see most influential, Fowler says.

After looking over the results and the approach the team took to test the notion that online social networks can affect off-line behavior, "I think they have shown that the message mattered," says Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, who focuses some of his research on voter behavior and was not a member of the research team.

While the team foresees a beneficial use for such online nudges to encourage participation in what might generally be termed positive activities, Dr. Ferguson sees a potential downside for those who dislike unsolicited messages on their Facebook account.

"The world in which we used to get dozens of calls at night toward Election Day from people calling us to vote" is long gone. "Spam has a whole new future," he says.

Previous

1 | 2