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Facebook vs Politics
Friday 23rd April, 2010 18:10 Comments: 0
Some of you may have spotted these two recent additions (an event and a group) to Facebook:
  • National Not Voting Conservative Day
  • We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the Lib Dems into office
I admit it's true that the Facebook campaign was a driving force behind RATM getting to the top of the charts (I was one of those people that downloaded the single), but when it comes to UK politics you have to be more realistic.

People bought the single for a laugh. There were no real repercussions, other than a rather unusual track will forever be listed as the Christmas number one single and over £83k has been raised for the homeless charity Shelter. The only "loser" was Joe McElderry, but the fight probably meant he sold more singles and got more royalties than if the battle hadn't happened - although it must suck for him that he hasn't (and probably never will) sold a #1 single.

The original Facebook group had around half a million members, growing to almost a million people after RATM had been announced as the winners on the Sunday before Christmas. Despite the large number of members of the group, only half a million copies of the single were actually purchased (that's all it took to get to number 1). This might sound right as it's roughly the equivalent of a copy per person, but many people in the group bought 2 copies of the song from at least 2 online stores (e.g. Amazon, Play), so you probably need to divide that number by at least 2 (if not 4) to get an accurate number of people that made the song get to the top of the chart.

Voters in the General Electon won't get that luxury (short of stealing their dad's card and wearing a fake beard...). For each member of the Facebook group for the Lib Dems, at most they can give 1 vote (and that's assuming they are all registered to vote and get around to voting). At the time of writing, they have just 142,017 members (unlike the RATM group, a large number of these people were probably already going to vote for the Lib Dems). These 142k Lib Dem voters make up a tiny fraction of the ~45 million registered voters in the UK (0.3%).

The National Not Voting Conservative Day event has 51,001 "confirmed guests", which works out as 0.1% of the vote (and many of those attending the event are probably members of the other group).

Anyone that thinks Facebook can greatly influence the General Election and get the Lib Dems into power is completely mistaken. Anyone that relies on the statistics from applications on Facebook are most likely making a mistake (unless the application adjusts the results to account for demographics, based on whatever information has been entered into the user's profile).
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