Sunday, November 23, 2014

No You Can't - Facebook Changes Policies for Political Campaigns

President Obama's re-election campaign paved a new path for politicians to reach their constituents. According to Teddy Goff, the campaign's digital director, the Obama campaign gained a Facebook following of 45 million users that year and registered over one million voters online to raise $690 million in 2011 and 2012. More importantly, the campaign's Facebook app allowed users to share their friends with the app's developers. The developers then compared the friend lists with voter lists to determine who needed to be contacted prior to the election. Facebook campaigning for the 2016 election will be vastly different.

Last week, Facebook announced that it was turning off the key function that allowed the Obama campaign app to work because it "widely crosses the line" of protecting privacy. Campaigns will no longer be able to skim friend lists, so relationship mapping will become more difficult than 2 years ago but not impossible. This development will be a big hit to politicians as 71% of online adults are Facebook users (50 percentage points higher than LinkedIn, the second-place service) and Facebook users are more politically engaged than the general public.

While there is no proven link between Facebook advertising and a political campaign's success, there is at least one study that shows Facebook may influence elections. Given the younger demographic of Facebook users, they tend to overlap more with the Democratic party than the Republican party. Mitt Romney had a Facebook app in 2012 as well, but it was less popular than Obama's. In addition, younger votes are harder to reach in general.

Given all the information about us that is shared on the internet without our explicit permission, does Facebook's new policy really protect us? Will these changes shape the 2016 election or will digital advertisers find another way to reach their target audience?

Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/11/17/the-increasingly-complicated-relationship-between-facebook-and-politics/
http://rt.com/usa/206251-facebook-election-graph-api/







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