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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."
That's only because a lot of people haven't yet become as adept at ignoring the adds on social media platforms as they already are on TV and print mediums. This noted effectiveness will wear off as more and more people get used to ignoring a new form of advertising.
The (insert latest social/consumption trend here) influences voting behavior more than (insert declining fad here).
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
You're talking about ads, but your friend might recommend something to you, and if it's someone you know or trust you are a lot more likely to look at it. And that's something that's probably never going to change. Gossiping would go away before that would.
Also in the news, a study of H.P. Lovecraft fans showed Cthulhu has the most impact on voting behavior
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Pff. The advantage of television (To the political BSers) is that it's a one-way, unmodifiable medium where you can make a statement without being refuted.
On the internet you're closer to verification and cross-references that can counter the shallow lies.
So, who's up for making a browser addon that automatically cross-references online political ads to various fact checking sites? ..Or just get adblock+ and opt out of it all.
Then maybe overlays a nice helpful graph or color to tell you how much BS you're being fed.
.... is effective on the unwashed
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
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Also this seems the article may be pushing the conclusions a bit to far. If my online "friend" votes and it motivates me to vote it doesn't necessarily translate to me voting for the guy he voted for. If there is a strong correlation between online friends and their party affiliations then it may make sense. But I think we try to keep our party preference away from friends - its easy to lose one or the other.
Seriously though, doesn't everyone have a DVR?
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.
Breaking news: Facebook users find Facebook to be the most effective means of influencing them.
Film at 11
This signature is false.
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.
Quoth 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. That translates to an additional 282,000 votes cast,
With elections being as tight as they have been in the last 15 years, and with the coming presidential election looking every bit as tight, this could be enough to make a significant difference.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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
" a much stronger effect on their voting behavior..."
The effect quoted is a 0.39% increase in number voting. That's it-- an effect of less than half a percent.
One wonders how bad the "conventional" methods of increasing are, if an effect of 0.39% is "much stronger".
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Why do we care what affects voting habits when we have no real choice in who to vote for in the first place? Will the outcome of this falls election really have any bearing on what laws are passed, which countries we invade, what services we have or how much we're taxed? No.
This is the only way I'm going to get through the next couple of months without strangling some of my FB friends and acquaintances:
http://lifehacker.com/5940319/how-to-block-annoying-political-posts-on-facebook
Short version: browser add on that lets you (among other things) filter FB to not show you posts containing words like Romney and Obama.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper