{"id":258708,"date":"2014-10-31T17:42:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-31T22:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258708"},"modified":"2024-01-25T17:56:10","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T22:56:10","slug":"facebooks-secret-newsfeed-experiments-affected-voter-turnout-in-the-2012-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2014\/10\/31\/facebooks-secret-newsfeed-experiments-affected-voter-turnout-in-the-2012-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook\u2019s secret newsfeed experiments affected voter turnout in the 2012 election"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As many users know by now, Facebook\u00a0routinely experiments with<\/a>\u00a0the structure of the newsfeed \u2014 that is, which updates its ranking algorithm highlights and which it down-votes or hides completely. Much of this experimentation is innocuous, but some of it has real-world consequences that extend beyond Facebook and into the disturbing realm of social manipulation: in the latest example,\u00a0Mother Jones<\/em>\u00a0reports that\u00a0the network tweaked the newsfeeds<\/a>\u00a0of almost 2 million users in 2012, and this experiment materially affected voter-turnout rates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Techpresident founder Micah Sifry describes in the Mother Jones<\/em> piece, the manipulation occurred as Facebook was developing a feature it calls its \u201cvoter megaphone\u201d \u2014 that is, a tool that allows users to post a prominent \u201cI\u2019m Voting\u201d button on their profile in order to encourage others to vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Experimentation on or manipulation of users through tweaks to the newsfeed is a controversial topic for many, ever since Facebook admitted earlier this year that a team of researchers had modified the newsfeeds of users<\/a> to change the emotional content of what they saw in order to determine whether good or bad news could trigger a kind of \u201cemotional contagion,\u201d and make them feel a certain way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some argued that this was just part of the tweaking that web-based services do all the time, and pointed out that the 700,000 users affected were a tiny portion of the social network\u2019s user base \u2014 but others were disturbed by what they saw as emotional manipulation without proper disclosure. And many saw it as another example of the potential flaws<\/a> in an algorithmically-filtered online environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Newsfeed changes boosted voting rates<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Mother Jones<\/em> story describes how<\/a>, in the months leading up to election day in 2012, Facebook made a change to the newsfeeds of 1.9 million users in order to see whether it could influence those users to become more interested in political activity: it did this by increasing the number of hard news items that appeared at the top of a user\u2019s newsfeed. According to one of the Facebook data scientists involved, this change \u201cmeasurably increased voter turnout.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Facebook<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As described in a public talk given by Facebook data scientist Lada Adamic in 2012 (a video of which has since been removed from YouTube, according to Sifry), Facebook made the change to the feeds of almost 2 million users and then studied their behavior \u2014 and found a \u201cstatistically significant\u201d increase<\/a> in the amount of attention they paid to government-related news. The number who voted (or at least those who said they voted) went from 64 percent to 67 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

It is curious that Facebook officials apparently thought that testing such a major change in its users\u2019 feeds in the weeks before the 2012 election \u2014 precisely when people might be paying more attention to political news and cues \u2014 was benign and not worth sharing with its users and the public\u2026 and, according to Buckley, the public will not receive full answers until some point in 2015, when academic reports fully describing what Facebook did in 2012 are expected to be published.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Experiment in 2010 also affected turnout<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As has been reported before, Facebook also experimented with<\/a> the newsfeed in the months leading up to the 2010 general elections. It put different versions of the \u201cI\u2019m Voting\u201d button on the pages of about 60 million users \u2014 and put them in different places \u2014 and then studied the reactions and behavior of users. Two groups of about 600,000 users served as a control group: one saw the button but didn\u2019t get any additional information, and others saw no button at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The results of the experiment \u2014 which Facebook users were not made aware of \u2014 were published in 2012 in Nature magazine, under the title<\/a> \u201cA 61 Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization.\u201d The authors, including both outside researchers and Facebook data scientists, studied voter records to see whether the changes actually affected voter turnout, and concluded that it did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Facebook-in-the-future\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

According to the study, voter turnout increased by at least 340,000 or about 0.14 percent of the total voting-age population in 2010. Compared to previous changes in turnout, the authors concluded that this was \u201csubstantial.\u201d The evidence indicated that \u201cmore of the 0.6 percent growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010 might have been caused by a single message on Facebook.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain wrote in a piece for The New Republic<\/a> after news of the 2010 experiment emerged, the research raised the possibility that Facebook could actually influence the outcome of certain elections \u2014 perhaps even without meaning to do so (Zittrain proposed that large web companies like Facebook be defined as \u201cinformation fiduciaries,\u201d and have specific duties with regards to the information they collect about their users).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What other behavior is Facebook influencing?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A spokesman for Facebook told Mother Jones<\/em> the research<\/a> in 2012 was just part of the ongoing experiments related to improving the quality of the newsfeed for users, and that the company has nothing to hide. He said the company took down the video presentation by its data scientist because it didn\u2019t want to pre-empt the research paper she is writing about the experiment. But despite such explanations, the idea of being experimented on is something many users find disturbing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci pointed out in a recent research paper on the social impact of \u201cbig data\u201d involving social behavior, these types of experiments make people uneasy<\/a> because they are \u201copaque, powerful and possibly non-consensual, in an environment of information asymmetry.\u201d In other words, they make users feel like they are being experimented on by an unseen and impersonal entity, for purposes that they don\u2019t really understand or in many cases are not even made aware of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that Facebook can manipulate newsfeed design in ways that can influence voter-turnout rates is fascinating, and perhaps even encouraging \u2014 but at the same time, the implications of that are disturbing: what other kinds of behavior could it influence, or actually be influencing even now, without our knowledge?<\/p>\n

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

As many users know by now, Facebook\u00a0routinely experiments with\u00a0the structure of the newsfeed \u2014 that is, which updates its ranking algorithm highlights and which it down-votes or hides completely. Much of this experimentation is innocuous, but some of it has real-world consequences that extend beyond Facebook and into the disturbing realm of social manipulation: in … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Facebook\u2019s secret newsfeed experiments affected voter turnout in the 2012 election”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gigaom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258708"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258716,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258708\/revisions\/258716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}