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The Power of Facebook, The Cold Reality of Stats

January 21, 2009 15:52 by author

I hadn’t heard of this until I saw it on Techmeme but it opened my eyes to some interesting points. First let me give you a quote…

The vote on concealing MPs’ expenses has been cancelled by the government!

In other words - we won!

This is a huge victory not just for transparency, it’s a bellweather for a change in the way politics works. There’s no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the Internet has seen to that.

Over 7000 people joined a Facebook group, they sent thousands of emails to over 90% of all MPs. Hundreds of thousands of people found out about the story by visiting TheyWorkForYou to find something they wanted to know, reading an email alert, or simply discovered what was going on whilst checking their Facebook or Twitter pages. Almost all of this happened, from nowhere, within 48 hours, putting enough pressure on Parliament to force change.

So basically they’re claiming credit for forcing the House of Commons to cancel the vote based on their online support. I had initially planned to write my standard “let’s look at the numbers of this” post but in doing that it opened my eyes to something I don’t think a lot of people realize.

But before getting to that, let’s do the reality check…

The Reality Check

Basically the original version of this post just took it by the numbers. The group that posted this claims 7,000 Facebook users. That’s in comparison to a population of around 60 million being represented by the House of Commons.

There are 646 MPs in the House of Commons meaning each of them represents a population of around 92,000 people on average. Meaning if this entire Facebook group came from one constituency of average size it would still only represent about 7% of the population.

Finally, of the constituencies represented Na h-Eileanan an lar has the smallest population at 22,000 voters. Meaning even if every member of this Facebook group was in the least populated constituency in the U.K. they still couldn’t swing the election of that one single MP.

So this 7,000 person group represented absolutely no threat to the MPs of the British Parliament which was the point of my original post. After making that point I was going to make a glib remark about the number of e-mails sent. Specifically I was going to say this…

“As for e-mails, they mean nothing. I can write a program in 5 minutes that will send thousands of e-mails to 90% of the MPs and it doesn’t mean I have any support beyond my own PC”

My New Admiration For Facebook

As I was typing that last line I realized something I don’t think I’d quite grasped before. Facebook has taken a lot of criticism for it’s sometimes over zealous drive to make sure every Facebook account represents an actual person. But what I don’t think people realize is they’ve done a great service to people who actually have accounts.

Unlike pretty much anything else online Facebook allows you to show a verifiable number of supporters. That’s huge. Nothing else that I can think of does that because almost any other service allows for easy creation of multiple accounts. So they are the single “new media” source for verifiable numbers.

Not only that but based on statistics they can provide you could use Facebook to prove where your support is, that your support is of a certain age, or any number of other things. In this way Facebook has done an even greater service to those who support “new media.” They’ve made it useful in supporting small causes in a way that nothing else ever has before.

In Defense of the Reality Check Mentality

Some people wonder why I do these “Reality Check” posts all the time and I’d humbly submit this point on Facebook as the reason why. Because when you do new media right it can make a huge difference. It can give us access to things we’ve never had before and allow us to accomplish things we could never have imagined a few years ago.

But doing that requires looking at the reality of the situation. Understanding why some things don’t make a difference and then finding ways to use the tools available to make the difference we set out to achieve.

People who claim credit for things they could not have been responsible for just to pat themselves on the back are working against that goal. Because if you hide the things that don’t work than people won’t know they need fixing.

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January 21. 2009 12:56

Please, O uninformed twentysomething eight thousand miles away from this story, tell us some more stuff about how the UK parliamentary system works in practice.

Way more than half the people on that FB group actually went off and wrote an individual mail to their local representative about a vote which was originally expected to take place with fewer than 50 people in the Commons. Some MPs have received dozens of messages. Over 90% of MPs received at least one.

The target was to increase turnout on a measure which only required a Yea from a simple majority of at least 40 MPs present to pass, in order to make sure that a larger number of MPs likely to be opposed knew:

a) That it was about to happen (the government buried it in a memo on the same day as it published plans about a major and controversial expansion of Heathrow Airport in order to ensure that as many MPs as possible missed the news of the upcoming vote), and

b) That all constituents visiting TheyWorkForYou.com would be informed about whether their MP opposed this measure or not, on every visit for the foreseeable future.

Carrot, meet stick.

The government, seeing that its ruse was about to fail, decided yesterday to impose a whip on the vote on Thursday. The largest opposition party, previously planning to not bother turning up, was forced by that to come out against and whip its own side. A full turnout plus only 34 Labour MPs voting against their own side would cause the measure to fail. In the UK it's VERY BAD for a government to lose a vote that it's put a whip down against.

So the government chickened out this morning and withdrew the measure.

Yes, the web campaign won the day.

Yes, the Facebook group was critical.

No, you have no earthly idea what you're talking about.

John Handelaar

January 21. 2009 14:11

I was once told that people who are offended by the facts are those that have ignored them. All I did here was to quote statistics, none of which you refuted in your comments. So as far as I can see I still think I’m right. But I’m willing to be proven wrong. So let me ask you a few questions

1. I refuted your mail claim by pointing out that it’s painfully easy to fake e-mail support. Do you dispute my claim there? If not how does a bunch of e-mails make any difference?

2. You also make the point that more than half the Facebook group wrote in but my main point was that the entire Facebook group, all 7,000, don’t constitute a large enough number of people for anyone in the House of Commons to care above. Given that what are you basing your logic on when you say the online campaign made a difference? Are you assuming the House of Commons

3. Would you at least entertain the notion that the time period you specified was also the amount of time it takes for the various political parties to put a poll in the field and that maybe negative reaction from that poll, a very old school way of doing things, is what changed their mind?

I mean, I’m really am a person who wants to get to the truth above all else but I don’t see any real facts to back up your claim. Add that to the fact that you didn’t even try to refute my logic that the number of supporters you have is tiny. So how can I be convinced of your side of things when you’ve given me nothing to go on?

Tom

January 27. 2009 03:34

thank for article very great it's useful for me

D'setiawan

January 27. 2009 06:03

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D'setiawan

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About Me

Hi, I’m Tom and I run the IT department for a non-profit agency which provides treatment to special-needs children. Though I will (like any blogger) comment on technology in general my main goal is to detail how I’m trying to use technology to help treat the children we serve and its my hope that blogging will allow me to connect with people who can help in that goal.

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