Hurrah! How great that Facebook is using its ubiquity to help spread democracy, not just Buzzfeed quizzes. Or so went the reaction to the news that Facebook is working with the Electoral Commission to place voting registration reminders at the top of eligible users’ news feeds. But let’s not award Mark Zuckerberg a Nobel peace prize quite yet. While getting more people to vote certainly seems admirable, we should be wary of handing corporations such as Facebook, which have vested political interests, too much power in the democratic process.
It’s important to note that these Facebook voting reminders are not the same thing as advertisements. A partnership between Facebook and the Electoral Commission is different from a transactional relationship in which the government pays Facebook to run ads reminding people to register to vote. Having a reminder at the top of every news feed provides the sort of reach that no advertising budget could buy.
While that may be the point, it throws into relief just how much power Facebook has on what informs us. What you see on your news feed isn’t random, but carefully filtered according to the latest tweaks that Facebook has made to its algorithm. And while the inner workings of that algorithm are kept opaque, it’s basically designed to prioritise two things: addictive content that ensures users keep coming back to the platform and profitable content that ensures Facebook keeps making money from showing ads or by selling user data to advertisers.
So while the reminders to vote that sit at the top of your news feed are bipartisan, all the content you are being served underneath them is not. Facebook is essentially helping to lead people to a voting booth while curating much of the information they get fed on the way there. And let’s remember that Facebook has proved itself to have some political interests that seem at odds with its democratic mission. In 2013, for example, Facebook contributed substantial funds to US politicians who supported policies that would crack down on free speech online, internet freedom and LGBT rights.
Political affiliations aside, these gentle reminders bring up broader issues surrounding institutionalised “nudging”. This sort of soft paternalism uses behavioural economics to help people make choices that are better for themselves and society. While nudging can have beneficial consequences, is it OK to allow a company such as Facebook to decide what is in the best interest of society in this manner?
Finally, there’s the fact that the Electoral Commission may already be behind the times when reaching for Facebook as a platform. Facebook’s demographics looked a lot different in 2010 than they do now: five years is an eternity in internet years. The major change, of course, is that the younger voters the election watchdog is trying to attract are slowly fleeing Facebook for platforms such as Snapchat. So it might be that the next election sees a big uptick in moderately liberal mums voting, but little change among 18-year-olds.
