Facebook’s manipulated social messages produced 340,000 additional votes in 2010

Evidence

The team calculated that the manipulated social messages sent 60,000 additional voters to the polls in the 2010 midterm elections, as well as another 280,000 who cast votes as a result of a “social contagion” effect, for a total of 340,000 additional votes. In their concluding remarks, the researchers asserted that “we show the importance of social influence for effecting behavior change… the results suggest that online messages might influence a variety of offline behaviors, and this has implications for our understanding of the role of online social media in society.…” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 938

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘social contagion’ framing is a core surveillance-capitalism concept that also recalls the reader’s knowledge of Milgram and network influence research. — connects to: Facebook ran a 61-million-user experiment on political mobilization in 2010 — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 935; Showing friends’ faces boosted Facebook voting message effectiveness by 2 percent — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 937; Facebook’s voting experiment proved social pressure can be instrumentally deployed at scale. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1388

Broader Connections

• Showing friends’ faces boosted Facebook voting message effectiveness by 2 percent #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 937
• Facebook’s voting experiment proved social pressure can be instrumentally deployed at scale. #expands (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1388