Facebook Emerges As Effective Voter Turnout Tool, University Of Texas At Austin Study Says

AUSTIN, TX — Amid an election season, Facebook has emerged as a place for more than just pictures of what users are about to eat, images from their workout or endless photos of their newborn babies. Nay, naysayers: The social media platform has emerged as an effective tool for increasing voter turnout.

That's the conclusion of a study from the The University of Texas at Austin that shows the medium is having an impact in promoting voter registration. The study, published in the Journal of Communication, found that people are significantly more likely to vote after getting Facebook reminders that voting records are public — with accompanying messages of encouragement or shame to coax them to vote, researchers said.

Like an electronic town square shaming, Facebook doesn't pin a scarlet letter "A" on folks, instead sending an onslaught of messages that allow people to gently shame friends for not voting, according to the findings. In postings and taggings of friends who have not voted, a substantive uptick in increasing voter mobilization was detected, according to the study.

Here's where the whole brave-new-world part comes in: The study found that the aforementioned tactics proved significantly more successful in increasing voter turnout than traditional get-out-the-vote campaigns such as door-to-door canvassing or political mailers, according to the study.

The study, “Social Pressure on Social Media: Using Facebook Status Updates to Increase Voter Turnout,” was authored by Katherine Haenschen, a radio-television-film alumna and visiting scholar at the Moody College of Communication Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life.

“This study provides evidence that Facebook can be used to increase voter participation by leveraging social norms," Haenschen said. “The Facebook platform offers its users the ability to generate an increase in turnout by tagging their friends directly. It works to increase turnout among friends who see other people being praised for voting. It shows just how powerful social norms are in terms of driving voting behavior.”

In three separate experiments focused on 218, 239 and 640 subjects, respectively, Haenschen tested different message strategies among Facebook networks of volunteers who helped carry out the studies during elections in 2013 and 2014, university officials said. Using publicly available voter records, Haenschen then determined which messages had the greatest impact on turnout.

The first message tagged subjects in a reminder to vote by emphasizing their civic duty; the second tagged individuals praising them for voting in prior elections; and the third tagged individuals to shame them for not voting in an ongoing election, researchers explained. All of the posts included links to voting locations and were constructed to give the impression that the messages were visible to all of their Facebook friends, officials added.

While the civic duty messages featuring reminders and polling locations had little impact on voter turnout, the pride and shaming messages both substantially increased voter turnout, according to researchers. In one study, turnout among individuals who received praise messages was 16 percent higher than those who received no reminder, they added. Moreover, turnout among those who received shaming messages was 24 percent higher, according to the findings.

In these individual studies, tagging one’s Facebook friends proved significantly more effective than traditional mobilization campaigns, which typically increase voter turnout by 3 to 8 percent, researchers said.

“Simply tagging friends in a reminder to vote is insufficient,” Haenschen said. “It is the heightened visibility of individuals’ voting behavior made possible on Facebook that appears to be driving turnout. The best way to actually increase participation is to identify reluctant voters in your social circle and tag them in a Facebook post praising them for voting in the past and reminding them you'll know if they skipped the election this time around."

So instead of posting pics of the food you're about to eat at a restaurant, think about "shaming" (we prefer to say "encouraging") your friends to vote. But even if you don't, please stop posting pics of the food you're about to eat at a restaurant. Please. Just stop doing this.

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