The Cost of Increased Voter Turnout

During our last class I hypothesized that the rise of social media should lead to increased voter turnout through its impact on expressive utility. Social media gives a user the ability to share with their friends that they have voted, allowing this user to gain expressive value from others knowing that they voted. Assuming that what is posted on social media is mostly true, and I realize that’s a large assumption, I posited that voting rates should have increased with social media’s rise in popularity, because people are able to vote and then easily let their friends and family know that they fulfilled their civic duty.

But what if social media has had impacts on other aspects of D? A common tactic to increase voter turnout is called social pressure messaging, where groups mail postcards to potential voters letting them know that their voting record and participation record are public. Katherine Haenshen lead a study to see if social pressure messaging could effectively be done with Facebook statuses and tagging, and her team concluded that social pressure on Facebook could also increase voter turnout. 

Now, after having seen the positive effects of social media on voter turnout, I need to get back to my original assumption that people are truthful on social media. Or even more importantly, that the people on your twitter or Facebook feed are even real people at all. Our last presidential election cycle was inundated with fake news and Russian bots whose aim was not to promote democracy, and our society has yet to find a solution or even agree on the existence of election interference. Another negative aspect of social media is the ability to only see posts and articles from one side of the political spectrum. This self-censorship means that we are not engaging with people whose views are different from ours, which has further negative implications for the future of democracy in our country. While social media has positive impacts on voter turnout, it also has negative impacts on the democratic process. Is our society better off because of social media, or do the con’s outweigh the pro’s, especially when one vote is not going to decide the outcome of an election?