Study: Online Social Influence Has the Strongest Effect On Voting Behavior 114
sciencehabit writes "Brace yourself for a tidal wave of Facebook campaigning before November's U.S. presidential election. A study of 61 million Facebook users finds that using online social networks to urge people to vote has a much stronger effect on their voting behavior than spamming them with information via television ads or phone calls."
hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
It could be that a facebook page doesn't interrupt you during dinner, or your favorite movie, or during sex.
That it doesn't use a melodramatic voice actor to sound all serious about the $TotallyEvilShit that $OtherCandidate does, and basically conflate that not voting for $EndorsedCandidate is a vote for raping babies with wood rasps.
Seriously. People are losing patience with the mud slinging. A facebook page can be ignored. It doesn't shove itself in your face. It doesn't scream. It doesn't rant. It doesn't turn the volume up 30 additional decibels to blast your brains out.
Given the substantially fewer sets of clear and present BADs being injected, is it any wonder that people would react more favorably to them?
Current TV ads are like the $PoliticalParty edit wars on Wikipedia for $CandidateHistory. Look, the ministry of truth bullshit with your truthiness gets old. Say your bit, the shut the fuck up already. If I want to know about your party or your candidate, let me do so on my own. Don't try to control my access to information. Don't try to poison that well. If you do, you expose yourself as dishonest shysters, and I will only want you to go away and stop bothering me.
I suspect many other americans feel the same way.
Grow the fuck up, grow a pair, own up, and let us make up our own damn minds.
Online vs. offline is irrelevant (Score:4, Interesting)
The article doesn't actually describe a test of online influence vs. offline influence. What it describes is a contrast between direct appeals from friends, using pictures, and a more abstract Facebook system. In other words, they are simply saying that being told that your friends voted with a picture of said friends was more effective than a text message or no message at all. It's a reasonably robust study of what it does, but it's a long way from the grandiose claims of the title.
It's possible that they are contrasting this with other studies (that they don't mention). Unfortunately, since they don't include descriptions of those studies, we can't know if they are the equivalent of this study. Do they include the many partisan appeals to vote for a candidate? Do they adjust for the tune out effect of the partisan appeals hiding the non-partisan appeals? Do they adjust for the differences between the Facebook audience and the other audiences? For example, people with land lines tend to be older than average while Facebook users tend to be younger than average. Older people vote more reliably, so a pure get out the vote effort will tend to have less effect on them (it can't make people who already vote vote more).
All this really says is that pictures are more effective than text at arousing interest. This may simply mean that the pictures make the notice bigger and thus more likely to catch people's attention.
Re:Online Social Influence ... (Score:5, Interesting)
>For those who are seasoned and thick-skinned, we have developed the habit of using our brain, instead of letting others to think for us
Yeah but you guys aren't even in the target-group for any politicians anywhere.
Politicians don't care about appealing to independent thinkers because even in a tight race there aren't enough of those around to make any real difference and trying to appeal to them means speaking intelligently which will alienate the entire REST of your voting base. You know, all those unwashed - they don't like politicians who are visibly smarter than themselves and they never vote for anything that can't fit on a bumper sticker.