Did Facebook popularity help in predicting Election Night winners? An early sample of some of the hottest House and Senate races bodes well for the world’s largest social networking site. The Facebook political team’s initial snapshot of 98 House races shows that 74% of candidates with the most Facebook fans won their contests. In the Senate, our initial snapshot of 19 races shows that 81% of candidateswith the most Facebook fans won their contests. The U.S. Politics on Facebook Page (Facebook.com/USpolitics) will offer more comprehensive coverage later today. Stay tuned.
There is so much wrong in all of this, but let me highlight a few things. Here, on the follow-up post, is the question they ask:
But are Facebook fan totals an indicator of how citizens will vote at the polls? Or are Facebook and other social services merely online popularity contests that have no correlation to the real world?
Those are not opposing questions! Not even kind of! (And what the fuck are elections if not popularity contests, anyway?) There are a few questions bundled up into all of this, none of which can be satisfactorily answered by the data we’re given here:
- Is becoming a “fan” of a political candidate on Facebook associated with actually voting for that candidate?
- Does everyone who becomes a “fan” of a political candidate actually live in that candidate’s district or state?
- What behaviors on the part of politicians might lead to having greater numbers of Facebook fans?
- Is the population of Facebook users who choose to become fans of politicians (since this is a subset of all Facebook users) representative of voters overall?
The answer to that last question is clearly “no,” since anyone who’s taken an elementary statistics class can tell you that seventy-something percent certainty is not really satisfactory. And that’s already a narrowed version of Facebook’s own question, which was if social networking sites have any “correlation” to the real world. The answer to that question is “yes,” but that’s a stupid question.
The frustrating thing about all this is that actual scholars could answer these questions in robust and meaningful ways if Facebook would release anonymized data of Facebook users’ activities and characteristics. There is a wealth of data there which could let us look at all sorts of interesting questions, but they’re only making it available to marketers so they can target their ads more effectively.
