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April 20, 2016
Facebook Can Flip Elections. Does It. Only Zucks Hairdresser....
A study by Robert M Bond, now a political science professor at Ohio State University, and others published in Nature in 2012 described an ethically questionable experiment in which,on election day in 2010, Facebook sent ‘go out and vote’ reminders to more than 60 million of its users. The reminders caused about 340,000 people to vote who otherwise would not have. Writing in the New Republic in 2014, Jonathan Zittrain, professor of international law at Harvard University, pointed out that, given the massive amount of information it has collected about its users, Facebook could easily send such messages only to people who support one particular party or candidate, and that doing so could easily flip a close election – with no one knowing that this has occurred. And because advertisements, like search rankings, are ephemeral, manipulating an election in this way would leave no paper trail. How the internet flips elections and alters our thoughts | Aeon Essays
Posted by gerardvanderleun at April 20, 2016 1:50 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.