Social citizenship: CNN and Facebook to partner on “I'm Voting” app in 2012 election
Two years ago, I wondered whether “social voting” on Foursquare would increase voter participation. — That experiment is about to be writ much larger. In a release today, first reported …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook’s election app partnership with CNN extends an earlier premise tested in the social-voting experiment around Foursquare: public online signals might be used to encourage offline civic participation. It also follows Facebook’s 2007 news partnership with ABC, making CNN another major news brand using the platform as an audience channel.
The arrangement puts an election-oriented experience inside a social network while giving CNN a defined role in its presentation, rather than leaving civic participation solely to campaign and government sites.
First-order effects
- CNN gains distribution and association with Facebook’s election-focused “I’m Voting” app, while Facebook adds a recognizable news partner to the experience.
- Facebook users receive a social prompt around voting that links civic expression with CNN’s election coverage.
Second-order effects
- Other news organizations face a stronger incentive to seek comparable Facebook integrations during the 2012 election, as CNN gains a platform-level route to politically engaged users.
- The earlier Foursquare test and this larger Facebook deployment shift attention from standalone check-ins toward whether social platforms can make civic prompts part of mainstream news consumption.
Third-order effects
- If media-platform election partnerships become repeatable, large social networks may become a primary interface for civic participation, with news brands supplying context and credibility.
- That structure concentrates influence over how civic prompts are presented in the platform operator’s product decisions, rather than in publishers’ own destinations.
The trend: Social platforms are evolving from places where people discuss public events into distribution layers that package civic actions alongside news coverage.