Early voting, where available, has produced record turnouts, on pace to rival or surpass 2008, the previous standard. Before early voting in Florida ended Saturday, voters were being told to arrive before 6AM if they did not want to wait more than two hours.
The role of social media in stimulating this demand is being strenuously debated. There are some who believe it is a significant factor because of its ability to create both personal connections to the election and because no one wants to be left out or accused by friends of not caring. Others are not so sure, citing competing support for opposing candidates that actually offends or is viewed as intrusive by those on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sites.
Recent research suggests that there may be something to the enhanced influence effect. A study of whether online social influence translates into offline behavior reports that a test of social encouragement produced a statistically significant impact in the 2010 elections, one that surpassed that of traditional advertising and media.
The role of personal connections and the very human desire not to disappoint or feel left out appears to central to this outcome, as the following article explains. However, one data point is not a trend.
In the coming days there will be considerable analysis of the various candidates' social media strategies and how effective they were - or not - within the greater context of messaging, performance and reportage. If the 2012 results confirm the 2010 findings, expect this channel to be even more central to future decision-making across a range of issues. JL
John Bohannon reports in Science Now:
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. The study comes hot on the heels of a Science paper originally published online on 21 June that tracked how people influence each other's online behavior through Facebook. A lingering question remained: Does that online social influence translate to real-world behavior when people step away from the computer? The challenge is to find online and real-world behaviors where cause and effect can be teased out with controlled experiments on a large enough scale.
In the spring of 2010, a golden opportunity fell into the lap of James Fowler, a social scientist at the University of California, San Diego. He had recently been introduced to Cameron Marlow, the director of a new "data science" team at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Fowler wondered if he could create an experiment using Facebook's giant social network. It just so happened that the U.S. congressional elections were coming up in November of that year, and Facebook was planning on rolling out a nonpartisan "Get Out the Vote" campaign, reminding people to vote by publishing a message on Facebook users' news feeds. With just a few tweaks to how those messages were published, the campaign could be converted into a massive controlled social science experiment: With less than 40% of eligible U.S. citizens normally voting in congressional races, would the Facebook campaign have an impact? Since no personal data of Facebook users would be released, Marlow agreed. Fowler's Ph.D. student Robert Bond led the research team.
On Election Day, about 60 million people received a message that encouraged them to vote. It included links to local polling stations, a clickable "I Voted" button, and photos of six of their randomly chosen friends who had already clicked the "I Voted" button. Two control groups, each containing about 600,000 people, either received a version of the message with voting information but no photos of their friends, or no message at all. Then, to track who actually voted in the election, the team matched people's names and birth dates with those in the official state election rolls. If the influence of Facebook friends extends beyond the Internet, then seeing the profile photos should translate to voting out in the real world.
The photos apparently worked: 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, the team reports online today in Nature. The effect was four times stronger than just seeing the voting message without photos of friends, and most of that boost came from the people's closest friends (judging closeness by the frequency of interaction on Facebook).
The study is "both significant and convincing," says Dylan Walker, a social scientist at Boston University School of Management. The next step, he says, is to see what kinds of relationships matter most. "For example, I have different types of friendships with my online peers that go beyond the distinction of casual versus close. Some are work colleagues that I see on an everyday basis; others are old college friends; yet others are high school peers with whom I seldom engage offline but whose updates I read on a regular basis. Do they influence me in different ways? Absolutely."
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