People are more likely to vote if they’re told their friends — or friends of friends — have. Study: Facebook drove 2010 turnout

Facebook’s efforts to encourage users to vote drove more than 300,000 voters across the U.S. to the polls in November 2010, according to a new study to be published Thursday in the journal Nature.

The study found that users who saw a “Vote” message in their newsfeeds that identified several friends were more likely to themselves vote than those who saw no such message. In addition, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, said, there was an indirect effect, in which friends of people who saw the message were more likely to vote than the friends of people who did not.


Users who saw the “Vote” message without the component referencing their friends voted at the same rate as those who didn’t see the message at all.

The conclusion: People are more likely to vote if they’re told their friends — or friends of friends — have.

Researchers extrapolated to conclude that more than 300,000 people may have been prompted to vote because of these social media messages.

“Social influence made all the difference in political mobilization,” lead researcher James Fowler said. “It’s not the ‘I Voted’ button, or the lapel sticker we’ve all seen, that gets out the vote. It’s the person attached to it.”

The study involved 61 million Facebook users and examined their behaviors; researchers later cross-referenced with public voter information to verify whether those who claimed to vote actually had done so.

Digital campaign specialists, who have long advocated increasing candidates' use of online media, cheered the data.

“If this was a truly scientifically based study with appropriate experimental and control groups, then this is fantastic news and important for campaigns and advocacy organizations to pay attention to,” said Jim Walsh, CEO of the online campaign firm DSPolitical. “Admiring the last three election cycles, we've seen tons of anecdotal evidence proving the significant influence online advertising's effects on voting behavior and this study further proves how the online tactics are gaining parity with the effectiveness of traditional offline campaign tactics.”

And Stu Trevelyan, CEO of the campaign software giant NGP-VAN, said the impact is sure to grow. “In 2012 and cycles to come, many more people will have adopted social networks, so it would stand to reason that these impacts would only increase,” he said.

Columbia University political scientist Donald Green called the study “ingenious” but questioned its claim that the influence carries over not just from one friend to another but to friends of those friends as well.

“I find the statistical evidence for the authors' further claim that the effect spread through second-hand communication more ambiguous,” said Green, co-author of “Getting out the Vote: Understanding Voter Mobilization.” “Their technical appendix indicates that validated voting among all friends was negligibly influenced by the treatment, and the same goes for friends of friends.”

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 1:00 p.m. on September 12, 2012.