If you live in a Super Tuesday state like Massachusetts, Texas, or Colorado and you know anyone who loves Bernie Sanders (or even if you know someone who knows someone who loves Bernie Sanders), you might want to check your Facebook inbox today. There's a pretty good chance you've been Facebanked.
Before you rush your device to the nearest Genius bar, let us explain: Facebanking is not some newfangled Internet virus. It's just the unfortunate name for the latest strategy Bernie Sanders' online army is using to get out the vote in key Super Tuesday states. It's essentially the next evolution of traditional phone-banking, a voter turnout technique for a world in which no one answers the phone anymore---least of all the legions of millennials who have been largely responsible for Sanders' rise this election cycle.
Using a tool called Bernie Friend Finder, Sanders supporters can find all of their Facebook friends who live in a Super Tuesday state. They can also find friends of friends in those states who have "liked" the Bernie Sanders page on the social network. The tool provides people with a sample script---much like they'd get if they were phone-banking---which they can copy, adapt, and send via Facebook message.
The tool was designed by a team of volunteers over the weekend in hopes of turning the swell of online activism around Sanders into actual votes. "People say that they love Bernie online, but that only matters if you vote," says Ana Jamborcic, one of the volunteer developers, who also helped build the campaign's social media organizing tool Connect with Bernie. "Voter turnout is abysmal in this country. Anything we can do to help turnout numbers, especially for Bernie, is the least we can do."
The Bernie Friend Finder quickly gained traction on the Bernie Sanders for President subreddit—the campaign's grassroots online hub—and has received tens of thousands of page views in just two days, with 80 percent of people clicking through to actually use the tool, Jamborcic says. Still, she admits it's tough to quantify the impact the tool is having.
Anecdotally, reviews on Reddit are mixed. While one Massachusetts voter said he'd been Facebanked and urged Sanders supporters to "keep up the good work," others noted that just because people "like" Sanders on Facebook doesn't mean they, well, like him in real life. "I got smacked down by a number of Hillary-supporting friends ..." wrote one Redditor.
What's interesting about this tool is that Sanders supporters have enlisted one another to do something that campaigns used to be able to do themselves, before Facebook changed its privacy settings. Back in 2012, President Obama's campaign created an app that scanned all of its supporters' friend networks for other potential Obama supporters. The campaign would then proactively ask people to message their Facebook friends about supporting President Obama.
But then, last year, Facebook cut third parties off from this data, frustrating political campaigns and dooming startups that depend on that information. Sanders volunteers have essentially revived this strategy while cleverly skirting this restriction. The Friend Finder tool doesn't ingest anyone's data or share it with the campaign. Instead, the webpage uses Facebook search to let Facebook users filter their own friend networks.
"Any user can search on Facebook to find friends who like Bernie Sanders," Jamborcic said. "We've simply made it a lot easier to do, and coordinated it so that everyone knows to go vote."
