Facebook’s secret newsfeed experiments affected voter turnout in the 2012 election
Summary: Facebook has come under fire before for manipulating the newsfeeds of its users without their knowledge, and now a Mother Jones report says the social network’s experiments may have significantly affected voter turnout in the 2012 elections
As many users know by now, Facebook routinely experiments with the structure of the newsfeed — that is, which updates its ranking algorithm highlights and which it down-votes or hides completely. Much of this experimentation is innocuous, but some of it has real-world consequences that extend beyond Facebook and into the disturbing realm of social manipulation: in the latest example, Mother Jones reports that the network tweaked the newsfeeds of almost 2 million users in 2012, and this experiment materially affected voter-turnout rates.
As Techpresident founder Micah Sifry describes in the Mother Jones piece, the manipulation occurred as Facebook was developing a feature it calls its “voter megaphone” — that is, a tool that allows users to post a prominent “I’m Voting” button on their profile in order to encourage others to vote.
Experimentation on or manipulation of users through tweaks to the newsfeed is a controversial topic for many, ever since Facebook admitted earlier this year that a team of researchers had modified the newsfeeds of users to change the emotional content of what they saw in order to determine whether good or bad news could trigger a kind of “emotional contagion,” and make them feel a certain way.
Some argued that this was just part of the tweaking that web-based services do all the time, and pointed out that the 700,000 users affected were a tiny portion of the social network’s user base — but others were disturbed by what they saw as emotional manipulation without proper disclosure. And many saw it as another example of the potential flaws in an algorithmically-filtered online environment.
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The Mother Jones story describes how, in the months leading up to election day in 2012, Facebook made a change to the newsfeeds of 1.9 million users in order to see whether it could influence those users to become more interested in political activity: it did this by increasing the number of hard news items that appeared at the top of a user’s newsfeed. According to one of the Facebook data scientists involved, this change “measurably increased voter turnout.”
As described in a public talk given by Facebook data scientist Lada Adamic in 2012 (a video of which has since been removed from YouTube, according to Sifry), Facebook made the change to the feeds of almost 2 million users and then studied their behavior — and found a “statistically significant” increase in the amount of attention they paid to government-related news. The number who voted (or at least those who said they voted) went from 64 percent to 67 percent.
https://gigaom.com/2014/10/31/facebooks-secret-newsfeed-experiments-affected-voter-turnout-in-the-2012-election/?utm_content=buffer7f34f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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