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What Facebook Did to American Democracy

azgreg

azgreg

Chicks dig the long ball
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https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-facebook-did/542502/

Excellent piece in the Atlantic.

Rebecca Rosen’s 2012 story, “Did Facebook Give Democrats the Upper Hand?” relied on new research from Fowler, et al., about the presidential election that year. Again, the conclusion of their work was that Facebook’s get-out-the-vote message could have driven a substantial chunk of the increase in youth voter participation in the 2012 general election. Fowler told Rosen that it was “even possible that Facebook is completely responsible” for the youth voter increase. And because a higher proportion of young people vote Democratic than the general population, the net effect of Facebook’s GOTV effort would have been to help the Dems.
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In late 2014, The Daily Dot called attention to an obscure Facebook-produced case study on how strategists defeated a statewide measure in Florida by relentlessly focusing Facebook ads on Broward and Dade counties, Democratic strongholds. Working with a tiny budget that would have allowed them to send a single mailer to just 150,000 households, the digital-advertising firm Chong and Koster was able to obtain remarkable results. “Where the Facebook ads appeared, we did almost 20 percentage points better than where they didn’t,” testified a leader of the firm. “Within that area, the people who saw the ads were 17 percent more likely to vote our way than the people who didn’t. Within that group, the people who voted the way we wanted them to, when asked why, often cited the messages they learned from the Facebook ads.”
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Not surprising as more and more people will see and only see Facebook advertising instead of traditional advertising on TV or whatever. And the line between ad and content is also far blurrier on social media resulting in more effective advertising.
 
I'm a conservative but I want a lot of people to vote. If the ads got more people to vote then it's a good thing because the results will reflect better what most people want.
 
Emily L said:
I'm a conservative but I want a lot of people to vote. If the ads got more people to vote then it's a good thing because the results will reflect better what most people want.
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That's cute, you think the vote matters? Please.
 
Emily L said:
I'm a conservative but I want a lot of people to vote. If the ads got more people to vote then it's a good thing because the results will reflect better what most people want.
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Most registered voters are extremely ignorant when it comes to politics. If they need a ad to convince them to vote someone then that is the type of voter we don't need. Because in this day and age a candidate's current views, past views, votes on bills, and who they donated money to can be looked up on the internet. Its why we got the politicians we got now. Its because of ignorant voters how a politician can say and do one thing and then shortly after claim the total opposite.
 
Emily L said:
I'm a conservative but I want a lot of people to vote. If the ads got more people to vote then it's a good thing because the results will reflect better what most people want.
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That's the right way to look at it. And Facebook, just like other types of social media, can be employed just as well by conservatives as by liberals. In the end, getting people to vote is the key to getting a government that best represents most of us.
 
jamesrage said:
Most registered voters are extremely ignorant when it comes to politics. If they need a ad to convince them to vote someone then that is the type of voter we don't need. Because in this day and age a candidate's current views, past views, votes on bills, and who they donated money to can be looked up on the internet. Its why we got the politicians we got now. Its because of ignorant voters how a politician can say and do one thing and then shortly after claim the total opposite.
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The truth is -- we all depend on the media, in one form or another, for our information, and political ads have been around since the printing press was invented.

You're right that candidates can say one thing and then do another, but the vast majority of the citizens will never look any further, so ads are still important.

One thing about Facebook, however, is the open discussion it generates. I'm not a huge FB fan but I've seen many political conversations taking place, and that allows users to read the opinions of others and take part if they so choose. Kind of like this forum but not nearly as in-depth.
 
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