Facebook has repented from their guinea-pig-creating ways, and will not be experimenting on the public with their “I Voted” tool this year, Mother Jones reported.
In past years, Facebook has manipulated various aspects of their feed and the “I Voted” tool to gauge how users would respond.
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Mother Jones took a detailed look at these manipulations. With various users, Facebook tweaked versions of the “I Voted” tool, placing it in different locations, and phrasing it it in different ways: “I’m a Voter,” for example, or “I’m Voting.” Meanwhile, they withheld friends’ “I Voted” statuses from some users.
A review of the experiment found that 20 percent of users reported voting if they had seen that their friends voted, while 18 percent reported voting if they had not seen anything about their friends’ voting.
And in yet another experiment , Facebook promoted any news story shared by a friend to the top of users’ page. They found that this increased the number of occasional Facebook users who voted from 64 percent to 67 percent.
Mother Jones describes the stunning results:
Of course, some of these numbers are dubious, as they come from self-reported voters.
Another key takeaway from Mother Jones’ piece: if Facebook did indeed help increase voter turnout in past elections, they likely benefited Democrats, since Facebook users skew young and female.
