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Facebook Wants You To Vote Tuesday
theodp (442580) writes "Six years in the making, Facebook's get-out-the-vote tool — a high-profile button that proclaims "I'm Voting" or "I'm a Voter" — will on Tuesday give many of the social network's more than 150 million American users a gentle but effective nudge to vote. "If past research is any guide," writes Micah L. Sifry in Mother Jones, "up to a few million more people will head to the polls partly because their Facebook friends encouraged them. Yet the process by which Facebook has developed this tool — what the firm calls the 'voter megaphone' — has not been very transparent, raising questions about its use and Facebook's ability to influence elections. Moreover, while Facebook has been developing and promoting this tool, it has also been quietly conducting experiments on how the company's actions can affect the voting behavior of its users." Sifry adds, "There may be another reason for Facebook's lack of transparency regarding its voting promotion experiments: politics. Facebook officials likely do not want Republicans on Capitol Hill to realize that their voter megaphone isn't a neutral get-out-the-vote mechanism. It's not that Facebook uses this tool to remind only users who identify themselves as Democrats to vote — though the company certainly has the technical means to do so. But the Facebook user base tilts Democratic." So, it's probably worth mentioning again that Facebook caught flack last summer for deliberately experimenting on users' emotions without their consent. And just last June, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC put out a call for "pissed off Data Scientists" to data mine critical legislative districts and "growth hack" ways to motivate "registered voters who are registered Republicans who we think are likely to support immigration reform.""
Since Facebook's users lean Democrat, more of them voting will mean a shift towards Democratic politicians. I bet the Republicans will be pissed.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
People who only vote because they heard about it on Facebook (or via that stupid sticker people wear) shouldn't be voting.
My circle of FB friends have been circulating dozens of GOTV images for the last month. My favorite has been a picture of a silly looking Tea Party guy in full regalia holding up an anti-government sign, with the caption: "This guy is voting. Are you?" (There are other more mean spirited ones that are kind of classist, showing rednecks, which I declined to share.)
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Facebook isn't abusing their user base in this case -- at least, you'd have a hard time convincing me that encouraging your demographic to vote is some sort of abuse.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Interview with Rayid Ghani, Chief Scientist Obama 2012 Campaign: Q. How did you use facebook and other social networks as part of modeling? A. We used facebook for a few different purposes: We used facebook to reach young voters who were hard to reach using traditional channels such as phone, direct mail, and door-to-door canvassing. We built models using data from users who authorized our facebook app that allowed us to ask our supporters to contact their friends for specific reasons (voter registration, volunteering, going to vote, etc.). Our hypothesis was that getting their friends to ask them was more effective than us asking them directly by broadcasting on our facebook page. We also used facebook to determine people's interest and send them messages that were relevant to them and hence increase their likelihood of taking action.
Back in 2011 we had a vote in the UK as to whether we would switch our voting system from "first past the post" to "alternative vote".
Although my Facebook feed was absolutely riddled with people proclaiming their support for AV and no-one for FPTP (and a quick straw poll of my work colleagues suggested the same for them) that wasn't reflected in the results which were that 68 per cent voted No (to AV) and 32 per cent voted Yes.
Facebook may have influenced some people to go out and vote, but it certainly didn't seem to reflect how the country voted as a whole.
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Republicans are hardly anti-H1B: GOP Leaders Clamoring for More High Tech Immigration if Party Wins Back Senate
false dichotomy
Republican policies are VERY different from Democrat policies
Look at *any issue*...Net Neutrality, civil liberties, jobs, economic policy, foreign policy...Democratic policy positions are demonstrably different and *better*
another example?
Global Warming...
GOP'ers still deny pollution harms the environmnet
Thank you Dave Raggett
facebook donates to GOP causes...and as stated in the description, Zuck's FWD.us is actively lobbying to undercut American workers
the idea that this system will "help democrats" is ridiculous...it's made specifically to influence votes...
this is a product launch, and the product is a perception control system that you can pay to use
Thank you Dave Raggett
Basically, their votes are for sale to the highest bidder. Convince them that "the man" is keeping them down and tell them who the man is and they'll vote against him/her/it. Convince them that so-and-so is like them and will stand up for their rights and they'll vote so-and-so every time. Left unchecked, the combination of uninformed voters and unlimited political contributions will be the downfall of free societies.
An excellent point. It is the duty of citizens to vote their consciences. Since those who are elected are making decisions for us, we, as an electorate, need to educate ourselves in order to identify the right criminal^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H candidate for a given elective office. Unlimited political contributions fly in the face of this. It's rather depressing.
On a side note, what the hell kind of country allows people to vote without verifying they're eligible to do so and are who they claim to be? I don't know what kind of warped logic that comes from, but it's so stupid that other countries are (literally, I've seen in firsthand) laughing at us. If the problem is that somehow minorities and poor people "can't afford" to get and carry a picture ID, fix THAT problem, not some almost entirely unrelated symptom. Or better yet, work on fixing the even more fundamental problem of poverty rather than whining about how this and that specific thing are somehow "not fair" to poor people...
I don't know about where you live, but where I live there is most certainly a verification process. I must sign the election district register where there is *already* a sample of my signature. If they don't match, then it's not me. I won't be allowed to vote again either, since my signature is already recorded. That's plenty of verification for me.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Personally I'd rather they lobby the voters than the politicians, you might say that people being gullible and easy manipulated is a flaw but at least that's democracy as designed. When politicians get paid lots of campaign contributions to buy votes while voting in favor of the corporations funding them rather than the votes electing them that's circumventing the democratic process. Not to mention that I think most voters vote for what they want to believe, facts be damned.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings