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Study: Online Social Influence Has the Strongest Effect On Voting Behavior
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."
It's not even a very large effect. From TFA "People who received messages alerting them that their friends had voted were 0.39% more likely to vote than those who received messages with no social information". Get a sample group large enough (61 million users), and you'll find many things to be statistically significant.
The article says "0.39% more likely to vote than those who received messages with no social information" which suggests to me social information made very little difference rather than the opposite?
If you keep reading you'll find it saying "That translates to an additional 282,000 votes cast, ..."
If this election is as tight as the polls are now, this is significant. Every vote counts, as we learned in 2000 in Florida.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
What it means is that more people are more likely to click buttons online and say they're gonna vote, then they're nowhere to be seen at the polls because they'd rather fuck off on Facebook all day.
No, they checked that in the study. Here's a more complete version from the AP that covers this:
Fowler and colleagues didn't just take the word of people who clicked the "I voted" button. They checked public voting records in 13 states for that election, and found about 4 percent of those who said they voted hadn't really cast ballots.