[1]. Bond, Robert M., et al. “A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization.” Nature 489.7415 (2012): 295.
[2]. 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 111.24 (2014): 8788-8790.
Summaries:
Both these papers come from researchers at Facebook and focus on influence of social networking platforms. In [1] Bond et al. run a large-scale experiment and show that how social media can encourage users to vote. They show that the social messages not only influence the users who receive them but also the users’ friends, and friends of friends. They perform a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages on 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 U.S. congressional elections. They randomly assigned users to a ‘social message’ group (~60M), an ‘informational message’ group (~600k), or a control group (~600k). The ‘social message’ group was shown a button “I Voted” and a counter indicating how many other Facebook users had previously reported voting including pictures of 6 of their friends. The ‘informational message’ was only shown “I Voted” button and control group was not shown anything. The authors discovered that ‘social message’ group was more likely to click on the “I Voted” button. They also matched the user profiles with public voting records and observed that the users who received the social message were more likely to vote than other two groups. They also measure the effect of friendships and found that likelihood of voting increases if a close friend has voted.
In [2] Kramer et al. analyzed if the emotional states spread through social networks. They present a study that shows that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion. The experiment manipulated the extent to which people (N = 689,003) were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed. They conducted two parallel experiments for positive and negative emotion and tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors, in particular whether exposure to emotional content led people to post content that was consistent with the exposure. The results of their experiment show that emotions spread via contagion through a network and the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods. In short, they found that when negativity was reduced, users posted more positive content, and vice versa.
Reflections:
Keeping aside the ethical implications, which we have already discussed in class regarding the first paper, I believe they were very well designed experiments which makes me wonder that is there a way we can get Facebook data for analysis?
While reading the first paper, the thought that I had in mind was that people must have clicked on “I Voted” just for the sake of being socially relevant but I was glad that authors validated their findings with public voting records.
Even though I really liked the experimental design but I still have major concerns regarding the imbalance in sample size, 60 million to 600k. Also, was that 600k sample diverse enough? I wasn’t also convinced with their definition of close friends that “Higher levels of interaction indicate that friends are more likely to be physically proximate”. How can they claim this without any analysis? It is highly possible that I interact with someone just because I like his posts but I haven’t met him in real life. Furthermore, there can be many external factors that make a user go for voting but in general I would agree with the results of the findings and even though we cannot say for sure that these messages were the reason people went for voting but people generally want to be socially relevant. It would have been interesting to see if conservatives or liberals were more influenced by these messages but I believe that there is no way to validate it. But one potential research direction can be to characterize people on different traits and analyze if certain types of people are more easily influenced than others.
In the second paper, the authors show that users posted more positive content when negativity was reduced. This finding is completely in conflict with many other studies that show that social media causes depression and seeing other people happy makes other people feel their life is “worthless” or not very happening. Secondly, Facebook posts are generally much longer than tweets and characterizing them as positive or negative if they contained at least one positive or negative word respectively is naïve, the entire sentiment of posts should have been analyzed which Googles’ API does very efficiently (might not be available in 2014). Apart from all these concerns, I thoroughly enjoyed reading both papers.
