Monday, January 30, 2012

Blog

Facebook data can – and should – change Congress

By Rodney H. Brown

An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg:

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg, I have a proposal that might allow Facebook to change the way governing happens in the United States: Give away aggregated political data for free to all representatives and senators in Congress.

Here’s how I came to think of this idea, and why it is a good thing. During the protests to stop the Stop Online Piracy Act earlier this month, I did my fair share of writing about SOPA, and sharing anti-SOPA memes, links and articles on Facebook. I even clicked on a few links to send letters of protest to my elected representatives (kudos to Sen. Scott Brown’s office for being the only one to send a response back — canned, to be sure, but still an acknowledgement).

All of the coverage in the general media about how SOPA has essentially died in its current form laid the responsibility at the feet of the letters that came from the online protest movement. But why did it take letters (assuming it did)? Why wasn’t the sheer amount of protest activity online enough to sway the politicians?

Ignorance, for one. The few hearings that were held showed just how ignorant our elected officials are about the Internet. Another reason might be because there isn’t one source that aggregates all that data for the politicians to look at. Enter Facebook.

There were 217 million people of voting age in the United States, as of December 2011. There were 155.7 million Facebook users in the United States as of the same period.

Assuming that a good third of those Facebook users are too young to vote (unlikely, as the average age of Facebook users continues to climb) that still means that Facebook represents a full half of the voting-age population of this country. Imagine how accurate a “poll” would be if it was made up of the anonymous aggregate data on Facebook about a political issue.

Half the population. Most pollsters in business would kill to get a representative sample 1/100 thousandth that size.

Make no mistake — our allegedly independent-thinking elected officials live and die by polls with samples that are in the hundreds of voters, or at best thousands, with supposedly accurate “margins of error.” The margin of error on half the voting age population of the U.S.? Basically zero.

Now, why give it away? Because Facebook doesn’t need the money (or won’t when it goes public and is valued at $100 billion), and by giving it away the company can remove any taint of its data being skewed in favor of one side of an issue or other. No money means no corruption. Also, it would go a long way toward healing some of the bruises Facebook has taken over its policies in the last few years.

But key to this is the second part of my proposal, Mr. Zuckerberg — every time you send that data to the folks on Capitol Hill, send that same data to the news media. That way, the media can cut through any possible spin the politicians might try to put on it at first (I bet they would stop trying to spin it after some time). Putting it in the hands of the media would also mean that a hot topic that is controversial wouldn’t get ignored by the elected officials.

I don’t think this country will ever drop representative democracy in favor of direct democracy — as some have predicted recently — for a whole bucketful of reasons, but we can come a lot closer to direct opinion polling. Facebook essentially already does that. Now is the time, Mr. Zuckerberg, to step up and use that data to be a good corporate citizen of the United States.