Yesterday Facebook and ABC announced a partnership to bring political coverage to Facebook:
ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership — the site’s first with a news organization — that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “U.S. Politics” category.
This partnership is primarily focusing on political news, but that alone wouldn’t be enough for Facebook users, so ABC and Facebook jointly sponsoring and organising Democratic and Republican debates in New Hampshire.
Now, this may look as a partnership to bring massive news (political) source into one of the most popular online social network, but is that it? If you think about it, Facebook has 57million active users, with 50% of them logging in to Facebook each day and spending at least 20 minutes on the site. There’s groups, there’s polls, there’s people chatting, there’s custom applications… And you bring politics on top of that.
I see at least two immediate areas of influence:
- Attempt for form the political view. This is obvious one, this has been happpening for ages with the help of mass media, and social networking sites are just another type of mass media.
- Completely opposite reaction. Most of Facebook users are in US, but yet this is international community. Given that, any political even will be analysed and will get different opinions regardless the government will. Now, add social groups in to the equation and you ultimately might end up with more objective voters…
I guess it’s really hard to predict where this is all going, but definitely it is going to be the new way of doing politics.
Now you have to thank Alexey, who installed the polls things, and here’s a question for you:
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Social network introduces an effective information sharing medium that tends to polarise the group in “love it or hate it” fashion.
Pretty much all information relating to politics I have got from social networks is pretty extreme.