A new study from the University of California, San Diego, shows how a Facebook get-out-the-vote campaign can have a tangible impact on voter turnout-but only when there’s a certain sort of social component to it.
The researchers conducted an experiment on every American Facebook user who was 18 or older during the 2010 congressional elections-more than 61 million people. Most people in the group saw a message at the top of their News Feed that
encouraged the user to vote, provided a link to find local polling places, showed a clickable button reading ‘I voted’, showed a counter indicating how many other Facebook users had previously reported voting, and displayed up to six small randomly selected ‘profile pictures’ of the user’s Facebook friends who had already clicked the I Voted button.
Another group (which the researchers call the ‘information-only group’ in the paper) saw a similar message, but without pictures of their friends, and a final, control group didn’t see any message at all.
