Study: Facebook Boosts Voter Turnout

A new study claims that Facebook's "I Voted" button was responsible for 333,000 more voters turning out on election day. If you ask me, I think it is more likely that those 333k people just didn't want to look like non-voting bums to their Facebook friends, so they clicked the button. Peer pressure for FTW! In 61-million-person experiment, researchers show online social networks influence political participation, with close relationships mattering most. About one third of a million more people showed up at the ballot box in the United States in 2010 because of a single Facebook message on Election Day, estimates a new study led by the University of California, San Diego.