Showing friends’ faces boosted Facebook voting message effectiveness by 2 percent

Evidence

The results showed that users who received the social message were about 2 percent more likely to click on the “I Voted” button than did those who received the information alone and 0.26 percent more likely to click on polling place information. The Facebook experimenters determined that social messaging was an effective means of tuning behavior at scale because it “directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behavior of millions of people,” and they concluded that “showing familiar faces to users can dramatically improve the effectiveness of a mobilization message.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 937

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Facebook’s manipulated social messages produced 340,000 additional votes in 2010 — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 938; Facebook’s voting experiment proved social pressure can be instrumentally deployed at scale. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1388

Broader Connections

• Facebook’s voting experiment proved social pressure can be instrumentally deployed at scale. #expands (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1388