![]() Any player can try to buy ads, donate to sympathetic groups, or go door to door. So what if part of the secret sauce behind feeds serves the aims of the cook rather than the customer? People and corporations in positions of wealth and power aren’t the only ones who expend energy to affect the outcome of an election. None promises neutrality, whatever that might mean, although some - including Google and Bing - clearly distinguish between results driven by the companies’ own formulas versus those displayed as sponsored advertising. Whether for search results, top tweets, or Facebook updates, each curating service uses a proprietary recipe to draw from boundless ingredients to prepare our feeds, and each is in a position to gerrymander its users, distinguishing between those it thinks will be supportive of its goals and those who will not. It is possible on any service that personalizes what it presents, particularly when there is an abundance of items to offer up and only a few that can be shown at a time. This hypothetical is an example of digital gerrymandering: the selective presentation of information by an intermediary to meet its agenda rather than to serve its users. If it did, should we have a problem with that? If we do, should the law somehow constrain this kind of behavior? Given the research showing that feeds can directly impact voting behavior by hundreds of thousands of votes nationwide, it’s plausible that selective morsels in news feeds could alter the outcome of our hypothetical election. 6 So our hypothetical Zuck simply chooses not to spice the feeds of those unsympathetic to his views with a voter encouragement message. ![]() He knows that Facebook “likes” and other behaviors can easily predict political views and party affiliation - even beyond those many users who already proudly advertise those affiliations directly. He arranges for the same encouragement to vote to appear within the news feeds of tens of millions of active daily users 5 - but unlike 2010’s experiment, he creates a very special group that won’t receive the message. Suppose Mark Zuckerberg personally favors whichever candidate you don’t like, and whichever answer you think is wrong to the referendum question. With the results in mind, consider a hypothetical hotly contested future election - maybe one that includes a close referendum, too. The study’s results are fascinating, and credit is due to Facebook for making it possible. 4 And as they point out, President Bush took Florida and thus clinched victory in the 2000 election by 537 votes - fewer than 0.01% of the votes cast in that state. The researchers concluded that their single message on Facebook, strategically delivered, increased turnout directly by 60,000 voters, and thanks to the ripple effect, ultimately caused an additional 340,000 votes to be cast amidst the 82 million Americans who voted that day. But with large numbers, that can mean a lot of people. To be sure, the impact is a modest increase: less than one-half of one percent. And their decisions to vote appeared to ripple to the behavior of their close Facebook friends, even if those friends hadn’t gotten Facebook’s original message. Users who were prompted with news of their friends’ voting turned out to be 0.39% more likely to vote than their undisturbed peers. That way they could see if, on average, someone in the group receiving the voting prompt was more likely to mark a ballot than someone with an untouched news feed. ![]() Then, in an awesome feat of data-crunching, the researchers cross-referenced everyone’s name with the day’s actual voting records from precincts across the country. ![]() Many of those millions of Facebook users were shown a graphic within their news feeds with a link to find their polling place, a button to click to say that they’d voted, and the profile pictures of up to six of their friends who had indicated they’d already voted. congressional mid-term elections when they wouldn’t otherwise have gone to the polls? 3 2 On November 2nd, sixty million of those visitors were subject to an ambitious experiment: could Facebook get them to cast a vote in that day’s U.S. In late 2010, Facebook enjoyed about one hundred million visitors a day from North America. But what happens should the interests of the firms and their customers diverge?Ĭonsider a hypothetical involving a phenomenon I call “digital gerrymandering,” grounded in a real, and fascinating, empirical study facilitated through Facebook. 1 The work of these firms to defend open expression has dovetailed with their function of pairing information producers and consumers. Marvin Ammori has offered a nuanced and persuasive paean to the lawyers of such firms as Twitter and Google, who helped to translate the values of free speech into the online environment during a decade when both the applicable legal principles and technologies were new and evolving.
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