The dangers of letting a Facebook quiz telling you how to vote this September.

Caitriona Pearson
Aug 28, 2017 · 5 min read

My Dad is that “Facebook Dad”. Posting photos, making status about his every move and sharing links he’s stumbled across as his thumb scrolls up and down his newsfeed.

Last weekend one his many shared links caught my eye — a quiz that indicated who to vote for in this general election. The clickbait worked and ten minutes later I’m being told what political party my views match with best. Even though I didn’t get the party I’m going to vote for on September 23 the premise of the quiz seemed like a neat idea. Take the sweat out of election day and help people come to a decision now.

Later, on the phone to my Dad we compared answers. Disturbingly, we were told we matched with the same political party, despite voting on completely different ends of the political spectrum in the last election. Sure, New Zealand political parties tend to converge towards the centre a little. But someone who votes Act probably doesn’t agree with that many Green party policies. So I asked, is there really any value in these political quizzes at all ?

The quiz I stumbled across was hosted by isidewith.com, an online quiz platform set up by a pair of entrepreneurs in California. This leads me to problem no. 1: The quizzes are not designed to reflect our mixed member proportionate electoral system. The quiz is formulated on what a political parties position on an issue is and how this position has changed over time. You’re not asked about individual candidates, specific policies or electoral success.

Example of questions on isidewith.com from https://newzealand.isidewith.com/en-gb/political-quiz

Problem number 2: The page actively asks for quiz takers to donate to their PayPal. Not to judge, but any page that openly asks for money is less reputable in my eyes. Implying the owners of the domain are looking for financial gain, rather than better electoral proceedings. Isidewith.com has been completed by more than 85,000 New Zealanders according to the sites statistics — a scary amount of people being told by an algorithm in the US who to vote for in September.

Another online quiz launched this week was Policy by Spinoff,a bi-partisan New Zealand media source. This seemed slightly more legitimate so I thought what the hell and had a go. The difference with Policy and the isideiwth quiz is that users choose a policy area and participants heart the political party’s policy stances they like. These “hearts” are summed up and users are given a percentage of the policies they agree with for each major party upon completion.

Example of Policy’s Economy section from http://policy.thespinoff.co.nz/topic/Economy#Revenue

The problem with ‘Policy’ is that it’s time consuming. The team at Spinoff have summarized party policy down to a few sentences ( an impressive achievement) but they’ve done this for every policy, for every party. It’s not a quiz to do during your tea break or before your lecture starts. It simply takes too long.

The other problem with Policy is you bring your political bias with you when taking the quiz. Don’t like Winston Peters ? Skip his policies, they won’t be getting any love. Love National ? Don’t bother to read the policies, you like National therefore you must like all their policies. Just like choosing where to get my news I can simply skip the political parties or individuals I don’t like and heart the ones I do, without reading anyone else’s policies.

Policy does a great job of trying to take personality out of politics. For the politically minded it’s a great summation of policy, but it doesn’t appeal to the people it’s supposed to be reaching — the people who don’t vote or don’t know who to vote for. The average twenty year old living in Hawkes Bay is unlikely to spend half an hour reading policy statements online compared to a thirty five year old university graduate living in Auckland.

So lets get to the backbone of what all these quizzes are trying to do. How do people actually decide who to vote for?

Well, there is a lot of political scientists saying a lot of different things and it’s hard to point to a key number of influencers. Your upbringing plays a large part in how you decide to vote — you’re more likely to vote National if your parents do or vote for left wing parties if you had personal experience of economic and social hardship as a child.

Some studies say who we vote for is genetic and how genetically disposed we are to change and new experiences. We might vote for one candidate over the other because of the weather on election day or the erratic driver overtaking us on the road on the way to the polling station.

In the USA evidence shows people are motivated to vote because they dislike one candidate. Politicians openly attack the other on TV, during interviews and in their advertisements because it encourages people to get out and vote for them.

We don’t vote for a political party or a particular candidate because we are told to, we do it because it’s part of who we are, even if we don’t even know what that part is ourselves.

Not knowing who we are politically was cited in a RANZ survey of young people as to why 60% of young people don’t know who to vote for. Young people asked for more information before elections, online voting and civic classes to be taught in schools because they claimed they don’t know enough.

A quiz accessed via Facebook telling young people who to vote for seems like the perfect plaster for a gaping hole in civics. But telling young people who to vote for is not going to result in a true reflection of what these people think. Even if we don’t know it, somewhere deep down everyone has an opinion. We just need to find out what that opinion is.

Online quizzes like Policy or isidewith.com get people thinking about politics. But we shouldn’t let them tell us who to vote for. Lets make sure young people get the education in schools, university and the workplace to ensure people have the tools to make a decision that’s right for them.

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