Paper 1 : A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization
Paper 2 : Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
The two paper discuss two aspects of the same phenomenon, one is specific to politics and other is general – influence of online social ties on user behavior.
The first paper shows that social messages can cause small-scale effect in political mobilization. They are more effective than just informational messages.
The paper performs experiments on influencing people to vote on Election Day. The informational message pops up in a user’s feed stating that it is an election day and if they have voted. It also shows link for finding the nearest polling booth as well as number of people who self-reported voting in that election.
Another variation of this message was a social message where the user is shown photos of friends, with whom user has “close-ties”, who have self-reported voting in that election.
The study finds that the social message has a much higher impact on political mobilization. The people are more likely to click on link to find nearest polling booth and self-report themselves as voted. The authors also mention that that this effect is only visible at a macroscopic level and when the pictures of close friends is shown in the message.
The paper raises many questions. First of all, there is no way to verify whether a self-reporting user has actually voted. Also, there are enough external factors which can make a user go for voting other than these messages by Facebook. It cannot be distinguished if these messages were the factors behind a user’s decision to vote.
The second paper takes a more general approach. It tries to identify if people are positively or negatively influenced by posts of their online friends on social networks. It saw that people post more positive posts if they are shown more positive posts from their friends and same for the negative posts. I liked its hypothesis a lot because it opens doors for new kind of questions, apart from general question of generizability, diversity and validity etc. Given that the hypothesis is verified by other experiments too and is identified as genuine human behavior online, the new question is , what causes such behavior. The people who start posting more positive things in influence of their social friends are really happier or are they just posting happy posts to stay relevant in their social circle ?
Another interesting question is for negative posts. If depressing posts make other people depressed and suicidal, then will social platforms like Facebook enforce some kind of negativity censorship? Will it be in alignment with freedom of speech and expression? These are very complex questions with no correct answers.
