Facebook Status Updates Help Candidates Get Out The Vote

Political activism in the age of Facebook. Truly, an impressive thing to behold. Over the course of this election, I have seen friends use every tool in the site’s ever-expanding toolbox—from groups to gifts to profile pictures—to get the vote out for their candidate. Interestingly, however, one of the most effective platforms for announcing solidarity has been the status update.

With teens and early twentysomethings slow to get aboard the Twitter train, statuses are the closest many come to microblogging. And for the past few months when answering the open-ended prompt (“What are you doing right now?”), it seems many have chosen to embrace the space as a virtual soapbox.

Of course, I bring this up on election day because the percentage of politic-centric statuses has significantly spiked. In fact, according to a story published yesterday in PC World many users (up to 1,215,555 as of this morning) have actually “donated” their statuses through the Causes Election Rally application. What does that mean exactly? From the article in PC World:

As part of the Causes Election Rally application on the social-networking site, users can pick to which candidate—either Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain—they would like to donate their status on Facebook. They also can donate their status simply to get out the vote.

Once users have done so, their status reflects their choice in this way: Elizabeth is the 470,111th person to donate her status to get out the vote for Barack Obama or John McCain, depending on which candidate the user chose.

The status update also includes a link to the application.

If a user changes his or her status after donating it, it will automatically be set to the “get out the vote” status at 12:01 a.m. local time on election day.