When Facebook and politics intersect, things can get messy. Conservatives and liberals fighting virtually through witty retorts and backhanded insults doesn’t accomplish much on the online platform.
But Facebook’s recent intersection with politics can hopefully promote a different type of interaction among users. Through the development of a virtual “I Voted” sticker, users can now publicly declare that they’ve voted to all their Facebook friends.
This feature, which has been a part of previous election days such as the 2010 midterms and the 2012 presidential election, can potentially play a role in motivating other users to fulfill their civic duty.
In California, many of the races were incredibly close. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors race is a prime example of this. Sheila Kuehl wasn’t declared the winner until the early hours of Wednesday morning, earning a narrow victory with 52.8 percent of the vote to Bobby Shriver’s 47.2 percent.
Meaning the one or two people who might have inadvertently seen your post and were then motivated to go to the polls could have affected the outcome of these races.
A virtual display of civic engagement caught me off guard given the normally politically apathetic nature of the posts on my news feed. Which is why I was surprised to see, as I scrolled further down the page, that many of my Facebook friends had taken up Facebook’s offer to virtually flaunt their trips to the voting booth.
Upon further investigation, I learned that this feature allows a user to find out where the nearest voting booth to his or her current location is. That’s pretty cool. And apparently, the button was partly responsible, albeit minimally, for increasing voter turnout in the 2010 midterm elections. That’s also pretty cool.
I decided to do some more reading about the feature and learned some pretty crazy information. First off, a 2012 study conducted at UC San Diego looked at the influence of Facebook on the 2010 midterm elections and found that social pressure does motivate others to be more politically active.
The study reads, “Social mobilization in online networks is significantly more effective than informational mobilization alone. Showing familiar faces to users can dramatically improve the effectiveness of a mobilization message.”
Essentially, if you were one of the millions of Facebook users who chose to click on the “I Voted” button, you could have motivated some of your Facebook friends to get to the polls.
Though there’s no way to determine an individual’s impact on the election via an online post, it’s interesting and slightly empowering to realize your civic action could have helped more people fulfill their responsibilities.