Facebook peer pressure that came in the form of a banner message showing U.S. users’ friends who voted pushed a third of a million people to cast their ballots in the 2010 Congress elections, new research shows.
Around 61 million U.S. users were shown the message and were prompted to click on an “I Voted” button to post a Facebook message informing their friends they did so, said a study released Wednesday from the University of California–San Diego.
Approximately 340,000 more people, the study said, voted in the U.S. due to the Facebook message and feature during the 2010 midterm elections—good news for both the popular social networking site and politicians using it to promote their campaigns. The elections resulted in a Republican majority of the House of Representatives.
“Social influence made all the difference in political mobilization,” study lead author James Fowler said in a statement “It’s not the ‘I Voted’ button, or the lapel sticker we’ve all seen, that gets out the vote. It’s the person attached to it.”
Researchers noted that the Facebook message had an indirect effect on getting people to vote, meaning that the friends of people who saw it were more likely to vote than people whose friends did not have the message.
The Facebook message also said in a reminder that “Today is Election Day,” featured a link to polling stations, and a number displaying the number of Facebook users who reported voting.
“Voter turnout is incredibly important to the democratic process. Without voters, there’s no democracy,” Fowler said. “Our study suggests that social influence may be the best way to increase voter turnout. Just as importantly, we show that what happens online matters a lot for the ’real world.'”
The U.S. Census Bureau said that around 53 percent of Americans eligible to vote cast their ballots in the 2008 presidential election. The Congressional midterm election was a bit lower, with a turnout of 37 percent.
“Many more people in the United States could vote than do,” the researchers said.
Researchers said they had to scour publicly available voting records to confirm whether people actually vent out and cast their ballots, instead of just relying on data provided by Facebook.
“While measuring clicks can give you a pretty good sense of how people behave online, it doesn’t tell you how many people really got out and voted,” they said, adding that “other studies have noted that a desire to conform to social expectations causes many people to claim they vote when they don’t.”
They found out around 4 percent of people who said they voted actually did not.
The team said that around 60,000 people were directly affected by the message but “social contagion among friends ... yielded another 280,000 more.”
President Barack Obama, during the 2008 election campaign, made heavy use of social media sites, especially Facebook.
But the researchers found that there were no differences between self-described liberals or conservatives.
“The main driver of behavior change is not the message—it’s the vast social network. Whether we want to get out the vote or improve public health, we should not only focus on the direct effect of an intervention, but also on the indirect effect as it spreads from person to person to person,” Fowler said.
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