NEW YORK: The world’s biggest social network, Facebook, has been criticised for announcing its plans to mine data of millions of American voters, just as an experiment which tried to encourage people to vote was disclosed.
The announcement came just week before the midterm elections in the United States this month. The company’s plans are to try to encourage voting – and mine its users data for political preferences, which could change the elections results.
The data mining is likely to prove controversial as it adds to the amount Facebook knows about its users – although the company itself says that the data is anonymised before being processed.
The move was announced as a controversial 2010 study has been revealed called ‘A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization’. It found that around 20 percent of the users who saw that their friends had voted also clicked on an ‘I Voted’ button Facebook is set to make available.
As part of the study, Facebook put different forms of an ‘I’m Voting’ button on the pages of about 60 million of its American users.
Company researchers were testing them to understand the effect of each and to determine how to optimize the tool’s impact, according to Mother Jones.
Two groups of 600,000 users were left out to serve as a control group-one which saw the ‘I’m Voting’ button but didn’t get any information about their friends’ behaviour, and one which saw nothing related to voting at all.
However, experts have warned the feature could be misused. Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, believes the search giant could even influence the outcome of an election. ‘Consider a hypothetical, hotly contested future election,’ he wrote in New Republic.
‘Suppose that Mark Zuckerberg personally favours whichever candidate you don’t like. He arranges for a voting prompt to appear within the newsfeeds of tens of millions of active Facebook users, but unlike in the 2010 experiment, the group that will not receive the message is not chosen at random.
