One of the most important civic crises in the U.S. is the declining interest in voting. In the November 2014 midterm elections, only 36.4% of eligible voters participated, the lowest rate since World War II. Even participation rates for presidential elections are about 5-10% lower today than they were 50 years ago. The reasons for this decline are hotly debated. Many researchers claim that the rise of personal technology like televisions and computers has isolated individuals from their communities and instilled a belief that political processes have little effect on them.
In the November 2012 and 2014 elections, Facebook attempted to reverse this trend by allowing users to post stock “I voted” statuses celebrating their participation in the elections. The following user interface was used in 2014:
With a user base of over 150 million Americans by November 2014, Facebook was in the perfect position to influence voter turnout. Facebook’s hope was that if people saw many of their friends post these statuses, they would be compelled to vote as well. To make voting as easy as possible, Facebook also displayed a map showing the polling locations closest to users.
Facebook evaluated the effectiveness of similar efforts in 2010, when it estimated it had about 61 million users in the U.S. That year, the “I’m a Voter” button that Facebook displayed to its users did not actually post a status; it simply logged the information to Facebook’s servers. For some users, the button was presented along with a list of the users’ friends who had also clicked it. In other cases, this list was not presented. Facebook reported that in about 20% of the cases where the friends list was presented users clicked on the “I’m a Voter” button; the figure was only 18% in the case without the list. Facebook claimed that seeing that their friends voted inspired additional people to vote in the case with the friends list, and it estimated that in total its efforts increased voter turnout by around 300,000. These results seem credible, but it is unclear whether Facebook properly controlled for the possibility that users were simply more likely to report whether they voted if their friends did as well; their actual rates of voting may have been unaffected.
In 2012, besides showing the aforementioned button, Facebook also placed news stories higher on certain users’ news feeds in the run-up to the election. Since these news stories were predominantly about the election, the affected users saw much more election-related content on Facebook prior to the election. When election day rolled around and users began reporting whether they voted by their “I’m a Voter” button clicks, Facebook found that 67% of affected users decided to vote, while only 64% of unaffected users voted. This experiment has fewer apparent confounding factors than the 2010 button experiment. However, it strays into grayer ethical territory. Facebook was heavily criticized recently for manipulating the news feeds of various groups of users to trigger emotions like happiness, sadness, and anger. While news articles are unlikely to cause negative emotions, some users may nevertheless be opposed on principle to such active distortion of their news feeds.
Overall, I found Facebook’s efforts commendable and am impressed by their results. Their work tackled an important civic crisis at a very large scale and provides great data for future civic renewal efforts.
Most data for this post was obtained from the following article: http://www.vox.com/2014/11/4/7154641/midterm-elections-2014-voted-facebook-friends-vote-polls