Friday, October 31, 2014

How Facebook Will Attempt to Manipulate You Into Voting This Election

If one understands the argument made in Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy the God That Failed, you will recognize that what Facebook is doing here is pure evil.

Mother Jones reports:
On Election Day, political campaigns, candidates, consultants, and pollsters pay close attention to who votes and why—and so does Facebook. For the past six years, on every national Election Day, the social-networking behemoth has pushed out a tool—a high-profile button that proclaims "I'm Voting" or "I'm a Voter"—designed to encourage Facebook users to vote. Now, Facebook says it has finished fine-tuning the tool, and if all goes according to plan, on Tuesday many of its more than 150 million American users will feel a gentle but effective nudge to vote, courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg & Co. If past research is any guide, up to a few million more people will head to the polls partly because their Facebook friends encouraged them...
 In 2010, Facebook put different forms of an "I'm Voting" button on the pages of about 60 million of its American users...Two years later, a team of academics and Facebook data scientists published their findings in Nature magazine...
After the election, the study's authors examined voter records and concluded that Facebook's nudging had increased voter turnout by at least 340,000. As the study noted, that's about 0.14 percent of the total voting-age population in 2010. Considering that overall turnout rose from 37.2 percent in 2006 to 37.8 percent in 2010—both off-year, nonpresidential elections—the Facebook scientists maintained that the voter megaphone impact in 2010 was substantial. "It is possible," the Facebook team wrote in Nature, "that more of the 0.6 percent growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010 might have been caused by a single message on Facebook."


-RW

1 comment:

  1. Can you imagine a targeted bring-out-the-vote campaign here? Facebook pretty much knows who you are going to vote for. Facebook also knows the precise hot-button issues of individuals.

    Also, it's not like Facebook has never tried to manipulate its user base before without their consent. There are plenty of stories of how Facebook carried out social experiment on its hapless users.

    Also, the use of social media in political machinations should not surprise anyone these days

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