Social Warming by Charles Arthur

Author:Charles Arthur [Arthur, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786079985
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2021-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

The last element to consider is voters’ interaction with each other over politics, and the democratic process. Here, Facebook in particular has tried to show that it can get people to engage more at the ballot box. Its first attempt to show that social networks really could make a difference to democracy was in 2010, though the experimenters didn’t reveal it until two years later. In a letter to the prestigious science journal Nature in September 2012, a seven-strong list of authors, including political scientists and, crucially, members of Facebook’s data science team, described what they called ‘a 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilisation’.16 The question they were trying to answer was: could Facebook make people more likely to vote? Previous research had already shown that within households, voting can be ‘contagious’ – if you vote, your housemate is more likely to, and vice versa. Emails urging people to vote, by contrast, were less effective.

On the day of the November 2010 midterm elections in the US, sixty million people found their News Feed had a message encouraging them to vote, a guide to local polling places, and a button to click if they had voted. Some saw a counter of how many Facebook users had clicked the button plus six randomly chosen pictures of Friends who had done so too – a ‘social’ message. A smaller group of about half a million people were shown the message, the counter and button, but no pictures of Friends; a control group, also about half a million people, saw no message, counter or pictures. By examining publicly available voting records, the experimenters could figure out if they had made a difference.

The effect was real: the ‘social’ message led directly to about 60,000 people voting, and another 280,000 who voted because of the behavioural ‘nudge’ of seeing their Friends’ messages of having done so. The effect was strongest among close friends; for those outside the ten closest, it wasn’t measurable.

A total of 340,000 votes out of 61 million people, or about 0.55 percent, might not sound a lot. But it’s plenty, in the right context.

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