How Facebook could help swing the US election

Could Facebook help swing this year's US presidential election? That's the possibility raised by a study showing that a simple message on the social network could help boost turnout of Facebook users by 2.2 per cent. With the right targeting of voters in marginal seats, that might be enough to swing an election.

Political parties everywhere work hard to get their supporters to the polls. Traditional methods, such as house visits, can increase turnout by around 10 per cent but are time consuming and expensive. Online campaigns, such as emails to supporters, are much cheaper but thought to have limited impact. The new study suggests that, done right, social media can be both cheap and effective.

On 2 November 2010, the day of the Congressional elections, more than 60 million Facebook users in the US saw a pro-voting message at the top of their Facebook page, placed there by a team at the University of California, San Diego. It included an "I voted" button, and the profile pictures of friends who had already clicked it.

Social component

The team compared the voting records of people who saw the message with those who did not. Just being exposed to the message persuaded an additional 0.4 per cent of users to vote.

The social component was more powerful still: users were 1.8 per cent more likely to vote if a close friend had also seen the message. The total impact on turnout is greater than the margin of victory in the national vote in presidential elections in 2000, 1976 and 1968.

Both President Barack Obama and his rival Mitt Romney invest heavily in social media, and will be licking their lips at such a cheap way of gaining extra voters.

Both campaign teams can be expected to modify their efforts to capitalise on this kind of social contagion. "If I was running one of the campaigns I'd pay close attention," says James Fowler, one of the authors if the study, which appeared in Nature.

Time will tell

That could mean that Facebook and other social media lead to a bump in turnout in November, but with both sides alert to the potential their efforts will not necessarily produce an advantage for either side.

A similar effect is sometimes seen in television advertising, where campaigns can spend enormous amounts and, in the absence of a big financial advantage on either side, end up in a dead heat.

Fowler's finding "illustrates the possibility of field experiments of mind-blowing scale", says David Lazer, a social scientist at Northeastern University in Boston. But he adds a note of caution: "Social media use is changing so much that it is unclear whether a similar intervention would have similar effects four years from now."

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11421

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