Facebook ‘I Voted’ button experiment: praiseworthy or propaganda?

If you posted Facebook’s “I voted” sticker on your wall congratulations, you were part of the most recent social experiment being conducted by the social media giant. The goal: Can users be nudged to vote by saturating their news feeds and offering propaganda stickers as rewards? This civic-minded setup has become an Election Day tradition on the website. These buttons, though, have also always been part of experiments. The voting button in 2010, for instance, was part of a study later published as “a 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization.”

The 2000 presidential election — where George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes — could have been altered by a Facebook election button.

Robinson Meyer, writer for The Atlantic

Why does this matter? Facebook can already figure out so much about us: our politics, our income, our sexual orientation — even when we’re about to fall in love. As Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain wrote earlier this year, the company could easily combine that tranche of data with selective deployment of its “I Voted” button and tilt an election. Just make certain populations more likely to see the button, and, ta-da: Modification managed.

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