- Bond, Robert M., et al. “A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization.” Nature 489.7415 (2012): 295.
- Kramer, Adam DI, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2014): 201320040.
Reflection:
The first paper resonated really well with my experience on Facebook during 2013 and 2018 General Elections in Pakistan. Election campaigns are no longer limited to the real world, and political self-reflection on Facebook is more common than ever. During 2013 election, a certain party seemed to have a clean sweep during election as reflected by user Polls on Facebook, and considering the amount of youth that uses Facebook, the predictions reflected by the polls seemed only real. However, the results of the election were not even remotely similar to that shown in the Polls and from overall atmosphere. . Some of the possible reasons might be:
- Not all people who were actively involved in the election campaign on Facebook actually voted: exhibiting political enthusiasm to stay in the loop weighed over actually leaving the house to vote in the long queues and scorching heat.
- Not all users participated in the campaign were located in the country during the election, a large amount of them were overseas Pakistanis and expats. The study in this paper didn’t seem to indicate if this fact has been taken into account.
Also, a large group of people (who don’t qualify as ‘youth’, for the lack of a better term in my vocabulary) didn’t use Facebook, or were hard to influence due to their deep rooted beliefs. This kind of suggested that social media doesn’t really have an impact on voting behavior of users other than the apparent hype. However, 2018 General elections had a higher voter turn out and had more drastic changes on voter behaviors and overall political scenario. Some of the observations are as follows:
- The youngsters influenced by the social media campaign several years earlier were able not only to convince their parents’/elders opinions over the years with logical reasoning, but also made efforts to take their old/unwell parents/grandparents to polling stations. The live stream of pictures posted by voters on social media groups had real-time effect on procrastinators, and several users commented on how they made an effort to actually go out and vote along with their families.
- Group members casually posting to have a laugh about spending the day chilling instead of voting were severely bashed and sent on a guilt ride by other members. A study similar to that in the paper regarding voter turnout based on their posting or interaction behavior would’ve been able to measure the influence of group members (other than the users close friends).
- The results also suggested that social media influence on voting behavior and political mobilization might not be immediate, but has more of a slow seeping effect in the minds of people.
The second paper induced the following thoughts about the design of the study and the results:
- The posts were tagged positive or negative if they contained at least one positive or negative word, which may give false positives about a post belonging to either of these emotional categories. A sentence such as “you should know how NOT to give up” might be an example.
- What about double negatives? “I did not see nothing“
- The study didn’t take the frequency of positive and negative emotions expressed on the pages liked or the groups joined by user. A similar experiment which takes these measures into account can portray a better picture about users posting habits and emotional states.
- It can also take the sponsored posts
- … and the videos /graphics content seen by the user.
