Increasing Voter Knowledge with Pre-Election Interventions on Facebook

November 13, 2017 4:00PM MIT 32-155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

MIT GOV/LAB's Data Science to Solve Social Problems seminar series

Description: The mission of the civic engagement team at Facebook is to give more people a greater voice in the policy and actions of their government. Fundamental to this mission is understanding the motivations and obstacles to participation; the ways in which Facebook can facilitate the motivations and remove the obstacles; and how the team's efforts impact people's feeling of political efficacy. In this talk, you will hear how the values of Facebook's Civic Engagement Research Team drive their product work, as well as a deep dive into some discoveries that have come out of the team's research.

Refreshments will be provided.

Winter Mason is a Computational Social Scientist (a.k.a. Data Scientist) at Facebook. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in social psychology and cognitive science in 2007 and did a post-doc in the Human and Social Dynamics lab at Yahoo. Winter does research on social networks and social media, including crowdsourcing, group dynamics, and social influence.

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The Data Science to Solve Social Problems series features practitioners who are applying data science techniques to real-world social problems. This series aims to promote dialogue and collaboration between social scientists and data analysts / engineers working on innovative projects. For more information on speakers and to get involved, contact Soubhik Barari at sbarari@mit.edu.

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