Could Facebook swing an election?

The firm announced plans to mine data of millions of American voters, just as an experiment which tried to encourage people to vote was disclosed.The data mining is likely to prove controversial as it adds to the amount Facebook knows about its users - although the company itself says that the data is anonymized before being processed. The move was announced as a controversial 2010 study has been revealed called 'A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization,'.It found that around 20 percent of the users who saw that their friends had voted also clicked on an 'I Voted' button Facebook is set to make available.As part of the study, Facebook put different forms of an 'I'm Voting' button on the pages of about 60 million of its American users.Company researchers were testing them to understand the effect of each and to determine how to optimize the tool's impact, according to Mother Jones.Two groups of 600,000 users were left out to serve as a control group—one which saw the 'I'm Voting' button but didn't get any information about their friends' behavior, and one which saw nothing related to voting at all. However, experts have warned the feature could be misused.Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, believes the search giant could even influence the outcome of an election.'Consider a hypothetical, hotly contested future election,' he wrote in New Republic. 'Rather, Zuckerberg makes use of the fact that Facebook 'likes' can predict political views and party affiliation, even beyond the many users who proudly advertise those affiliations directly. 'With that knowledge, our hypothetical Zuck chooses not to spice the feeds of users unsympathetic to his views. 'Such machinations then flip the outcome of our hypothetical election. Should the law constrain this kind of behavior?The firm will also collect data on its users in upcoming elections, it revealed today.'Given the volume of conversation around politics on Facebook, we believe this data truly represents what the American people think about the potential candidates,' said Andy Mitchell Facebook's Director of News and Global Media Partnerships in a statement. (dailymail.co.uk)Bakudaily.Az