A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization

By Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason Jeffrey Jones, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron A. Marlow, Jaime E. Settle, James H. Fowler. 2012

2,393 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human behaviour is thought to spread through face-to-face social networks, but it is difficult to identify social influence effects in observational studies, and it is unknown whether online social networks operate in the same way–. Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people. Furthermore, the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users’ friends, and friends of friends. The effect of social transmission on real-world voting was greater than the direct effect of the messages themselves, and nearly all the transmission occurred between ‘close friends’ who were more likely to have a face-to-face relationship. These results suggest that strong ties are instrumental for spreading both online and real-world behaviour in human social networks.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

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Citations in the corpus

Using Simpson's Paradox to Discover Interesting Patterns in Behavioral Data (2018, background): “Data mining algorithms have explored behavioral data to test social psychology and decision theories (Kleinberg et al. 2017; Bond et al. 2012) and obtain new insights into factors affecting online behavior.”
Computational social scientist beware: Simpson’s paradox in behavioral data (2017, neutral): “Algorithms have mined behavioral data to validate theories of individual decision making and social interaction [5, 12] and produce new insights into ﬁrst principles of human behavior.”
Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks (2014, background): “More importantly, given the massive scale of social networks such as Facebook, even small effects can have large aggregated consequences (14, 15): For example, the well-documented connection between emotions and physical well-being suggests the importance of these findings for public health.”
Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France (2018, background): “Nickerson (2008) and Bond et al. (2012) provide direct evidence of the diffusion of voter turnout off- and online in more recent elections.”
Twitter as Data (2018, methodology): “Facebook was used in the 2010 United States Congressional Election to mobilize 340,000 additional voters (Bond et al., 2012).”
Geographical Psychology (2016, background): “Numerous studies have shown that social influence affects attitudes about a range of social, moral, and political issues (Cohen, 1996) as well as social and health behavior (Bond et al., 2012; Glymour, Avendaño, & Berkman, 2007; Talhelm et al., 2014).”
Structure and dynamics of molecular networks: A novel paradigm of drug discovery: A comprehensive review (2012, background): “Interestingly, targeting neighbors was found to be more influential on the behavior of social networks than direct targeting (Bond et al., 2012).”
Facebook, Twitter, and Youth Engagement: A Quasi-experimental Study of Social Media Use and Protest Behavior Using Propensity Score Matching (2014, result): “In this regard, the findings are more consistent with experimental work on behavior diffusion by Bond et al. (2012), Centola (2010), and others.”
The future of social media in marketing (2019, background): “Indeed, Bond et al. (2012) have shown that with simple interventions, social media platforms can increase targeted audiences’ likelihood of voting.”
Digital Footprints: Opportunities and Challenges for Online Social Research (2014, background): “One solution is to conduct controlled experiments that manipulate exposure to a possible contagion, as in the Facebook experiment by Bond et al. (2012) noted above.”
Accidental exposure to politics on social media as online participation equalizer in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom (2016, background): “Bond et al.’s research (2012) provides a highly illustrative example of this diffusion dynamic.”
The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections (2015, background): “Notably, an experiment reported recently suggested that flashing “VOTE” ads to 61 million Facebook users caused more than 340,000 people to vote that day who otherwise would not have done so (44).”
Data ex Machina: Introduction to Big Data (2017, background): “Facebook has been the setting for several large-scale field experiments using randomized manipulations of what people could see about their peers to study social influence (Bond et al. 2012, Kramer et al. 2014).”
Political Fact-Checking on Twitter: When Do Corrections Have an Effect? (2018, background): “An important power in political conversation is an individual’s ability to influence others (Bond et al., 2012; Eveland, Morey, & Hutchens, 2011).”
Characterizing the 2016 Russian IRA influence campaign (2018, background): “Findings that focus on the positive effects of social media, such as increasing voter turnout (Bond et al. 2012) or exposure to diverse political views (Bakshy et al.”