Upcoming Policy Event
AAAS Forum on Science & Technology Policy
Washington, D.C., June 21 – 22, 2018.
https://www.aaas.org/page/forum-science-technology-policy?et_rid=35075781&et_cid=1876236
From AAAS: “The annual AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy is the conference for people interested in public policy issues facing the science, engineering, and higher education communities. Since 1976, it has been the place where insiders go to learn what is happening and what is likely to happen in the coming year on the federal budget and the growing number of policy issues that affect researchers and their institutions.”
Follow-up on the April 1 Policy Post: Experiments on FaceBook Data
US organizations and individuals influence voters through posts in social media and analysis (and misanalysis) of publicly-available data. Experimentation has been reported on the use of FaceBook data to show techniques that can be used to change elections (Nature, volume 489, pages 295–298 (13 September 2012)). Particularly, the authors looked at data during the 2010 US Congressional elections and showed how to affect voting. They 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.”
For more information and analysis, see Zoe Corbyn’s article “Facebook experiment boosts US voter turnout.”
https://www.nature.com/news/facebook-experiment-boosts-us-voter-turnout-1.11401