{"id":6138,"date":"2014-10-31T11:56:56","date_gmt":"2014-10-31T17:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=6138"},"modified":"2014-10-31T11:56:56","modified_gmt":"2014-10-31T17:56:56","slug":"facebook-wants-you-to-vote-on-tuesday-heres-how-it-messed-with-your-feed-in-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=6138","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Wants You to Vote on Tuesday. Here’s How It Messed With Your Feed in 2012."},"content":{"rendered":"

Micah Sifry<\/a>:<\/p>\n

On Election Day, political campaigns, candidates, consultants, and pollsters pay close attention to who votes and why\u2014and so does Facebook. For the past six years, on every national Election Day, the social-networking behemoth has pushed out a tool\u2014a high-profile button that proclaims “I’m Voting” or “I’m a Voter”\u2014designed to encourage Facebook users to vote. Now, Facebook says it has finished fine-tuning the tool, and if all goes according to plan, on Tuesday many of its more than 150 million American users will feel a gentle but effective nudge to vote, courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg & Co. If past research is any guide, 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\u2014what the firm calls the “voter megaphone”\u2014has 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.
 
 In particular, Facebook has studied how changes in the news feed seen by its users\u2014the constant drip-drip-drip of information shared by friends that is heart of their Facebook experience\u2014can affect their level of interest in politics and their likelihood of voting. For one such experiment, conducted in the three months prior to Election Day in 2012, Facebook increased the amount of hard news stories at the top of the feeds of 1.9 million users. According to one Facebook data scientist, that change\u2014which users were not alerted to\u2014measurably increased civic engagement and voter turnout.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Micah Sifry: On Election Day, political campaigns, candidates, consultants, and pollsters pay close attention to who votes and why\u2014and so does Facebook. For the past six years, on every national Election Day, the social-networking behemoth has pushed out a tool\u2014a high-profile button that proclaims “I’m Voting” or “I’m a Voter”\u2014designed to encourage Facebook users to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6138"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6138"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6139,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6138\/revisions\/6139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}