

Facebook experiment boosts US voter turnout (2012) - philip1209
http://www.nature.com/news/facebook-experiment-boosts-us-voter-turnout-1.11401

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fffrad
Was facebook the only influence in those people to vote? I understand there
was a study behind it, but what would have happened if facebook didn't display
the message.

Here is an example, I worked on a website where we redesigned a page. All of
the sudden we got an increase in traffic.

I insisted that the reason for the traffic increase had nothing to do with the
redesign. More page views could have been a result of another website linking
to us. (the real reason was the website appeared on TV) But at the time the
business team did not know that, so they just said it's the redesign.

My point is, there are lots of factors that can influence the vote, and with
the very little detail it is hard to say that Facebook was the cause.

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patcon
The important detail is that the findings were based on comparing 3 different
groups in a multivariate test. In theory, that controls for the sorts of
things you mentioned :)

