Facebook Wants You to Vote on Tuesday. Here's How It Messed With Your Feed in 2012. | Mother Jones

Facebook gets out the vote

"This is the age of big data and powerful algorithms that can sort people and manipulate them in many hidden ways. Using those tools, national political campaigns, building on the Obama 2012 reelection effort, are learning how to "engineer the public" without the public's knowledge, as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has warned. Consequently, there is a strong case for greater Facebook transparency when it comes to its political efforts and experiments. Clearly, the company is proud of the voter megaphone. After a successful test run in the Indian national elections this spring, the company announced that it would be putting the tool on the pages of users in all the major democracies holding national elections this year and that it would also deploy the tool for the European Union vote. According to Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook's policy team, the megaphone was seen by 24.6 million Brazilians during the first round in that nation's recent election."

Facebook Wants You to Vote on Tuesday. Here's How It Messed With Your Feed in 2012. | Mother Jones