- A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization
- Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
61 million Facebook users received a special social message at the top of their News Feed, on the day of the Congressional elections, which included polling-place link; “I Voted” button, with a counter showing how many other Facebook users had previously reported voting; and also pictures of the user’s friends who had reported voting. There were also two other groups of users who were randomly selected (about 600000 users): One group received Informational message that was like Social message but with no pictures; the other received no voting message at all.
The results of this study showed that users who received the informational message voted at the same rate as those who saw no message at all. Authors estimated that the social message directly and indirectly increased voter turnout by 60,000 and 280,000 votes respectively (340000 votes in total).
In second research, researchers performed an experiment (manipulating the emotions of users[1]) with Facebook users to test whether emotional contagion occurs between users by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. They showed that when positive expressions were reduced, the positive posts and more negative posts are produced by users and vice versa. These results indicate that users’ emotions can be influenced by other users on social networks (emotional contagion).
The upcoming political election, is a good example for both research because it can be a potential source for emotional contagion. In these days we can see posts, memes, and many articles in every social network about the negatives/positives of each candidate which can lead to mixed emotions. Advertisements are focusing on the negative behaviors of candidates and also topics like taxes, guns or other high conflict topics which can increase anger, distress and sadness and can be spread unknowingly between people.
The authors of the first research also published another paper[2] recently with the same research topic and approach but this time for 2012 presidential election. Facebook also did another research to see if they could influence voter behavior. Their results showed that Facebook could play a considerable role in influencing how people vote. They actually, changed the News Feeds of 1.9 million users and studied how they behaved, which lead to a 3% increase in the number of people who voted[3]. I think the results of all of these research show the considerable impact of social networks on user’s emotions. I mean these results depict how social networks benefit from the existence of social contagion.
As mentioned, the first research focused more on the effect of social messages in Congressional Elections (the effect of social contagion on voting). I think if we study the social influence in social networks, we should also consider the effect of influencers, especially in important events such as elections. Influencers play critical role in information dissemination during the election days. They are unique and drive huge amounts of engagement, and discussion. Their millions of followers can make or break a campaign with just one video. So they can influence voters’ behavior. For example, in 2017 Iranian presidential election, I remember an influencer only used the color of one of the candidates (each candidate had selected a specific color for her/his campaign) in her profile picture. Then, many people started to use that color in their profile picture and after that this behavior spread between people. Many people even didn’t know who started using this color in profile picture, but because they saw their friends, families or other people were using this color, they wanted to show they are among them too.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/facebook-study-emotional-states-transfer-2014-6#ixzz3HkSqIikX
[2] Jason J. Jones et al. “Social influence and political mobilization: Further evidence from a randomized experiment in the 2012 U.S. presidential election” April 26, 2017https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0173851
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/facebooks-news-feed-voting-experiment-2012-2014-10
