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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).
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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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.... 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
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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.
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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.
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.
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So, who's up for making a browser addon that automatically cross-references online political ads to various fact checking sites?
But since ad-checking sites have their agenda too, we'd need another app to cross-reference the fact checking sites to fact checking site verfication sites...
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.