Facebook and Voting

Check out this new paper that was just published in Nature about voter participation and Facebook friendships. It was a collaboration between Facebook Data team, my collaborator James Fowler (who is a political scientist by training), and others at UC San Diego.

This paper is in the process of making waves. For example, here is what the New York Times had to say about it in its article. By the way, the research for this paper was funded in part by a joint grant that James and I have from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, though please note that I was not part of this project. (I did read an early draft of this paper over 1.5 years ago and gave some comments on it, and that is the extent of my involvement.) It is really cool that we get to mention this paper in our report to the funding agency, though!