Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

With a presidential election year comes the inevitable buzz about how how young people will participate in the democratic process.  This year, however, the buzz is about younger voters starting to fulfill the promise of the 26th Amendment, rather than a drumbeat about their apathy. Perhaps this should come as no surprise. A recent Pew Research Center study showed 18-29 year olds are more invested in politics with 85% showing interested in keeping up with national affairs, compared to 71% in 1999. An interest in local politics leaped from 49% in 1999 to 77% today. This increase in interest and investment seems to be playing itself out over the primary season.

There's been a lot of buzz lately about Facebook "censorship" of free speech.  The Blackadder One case I wrote about a couple weeks ago was just an early warning sign of more trouble to come.  Recently Jon Pincus has been posting a series of diaries at Tales from the Net and Liminal States about his encounter with problems very similar to those Derek Blackadder ran into when he tried to organize workers on Facebook.   Pincus's posts include a very good trail of documentation of the problems he's encountering, which make this series one of the more interesting resources on Facebook censorship I've seen.  (As an aside: thoroughly and clearly documenting the problems you have with software is one of the best ways you can help your software or service provider diagnose and fix the problem.  But that's a rant for another day.)

As it turns out, Blackadder and Pincus are running up against Facebook's rather crude anti-spam filters, which, in certain cases, flag a discussion board post as spam if the post includes a link to a web page outside of Facebook.  While one can certainly sympathize with Facebook's desire to block spam on its services, it's easy to see how this kind of crude filtering technology (which is well behind the cutting edge of spam filtering software, by the way) can cause problems for those trying to organize Facebook users for legitimate purposes.  It does appear that Facebook isn't trying to block or suppress speech per se, since spam-filtered posts are often ensconced in a trail of other, non-filtered posts with very free-ranging discussion.  Still, the result of Facebook's crude filters is, as Pincus says, a chilling effect on political speech.

Now Pincus is extrapolating his experience into something which is hopefully more useful to the wider Facebook community - a guide for responding when Facebook censors your political speech, based at Wired's how-to wiki.  If you're having trouble with spam-filtering on Facebook, check out this resource, and if you have more to add, go ahead and do so.

I hope that this resource will lay the groundwork for later resources which help online activists fight draconian online corporate policies in a variety of contexts, like Google account shutdowns and the plethora of Beacon-like Facebook abuses likely to come in the future.  Eventually, I'd like to see a resource that provides top-notch practical and legal advice to social networking consumers, and perhaps serves as a hub for organization, in much the same way that Chilling Effects serves bloggers who are harassed by corporate cease-and-desist letters.  Extrapolating out a bit, such resources could be the starting point for a well-organized online consumer movement which I wrote about yesterday.

For now, though, if you are running into Facebook's spam filters, or if you are having similar problems at other social networking sites, check out the Pincus guide, and add on to it if you have more to contribute.

On Saturday, MySpace, MTV and the Associated Press sponsored a live broadcast of candidate interviews with questions coming from young voters in the audience. Barack Obama was there on time, "fired up and ready to go." But the two leading Republican candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney, failed even to appear. Hillary Clinton was late, forcing MTV to ad lib through fifteen minutes of otherwise empty airtime. These are hardly major blunders in the middle of a hectic Super Tuesday campaign schedule, but the actions of the candidates illustrated once more, why Obama is surging among an emerging generation of young voters.

This is not the first time Republicans have had a hard time generating much enthusiasm for campaigning for the votes of Millennials-- those 25 and under--who get much of their campaign information from social networks. It took two tries and the anguished cries of that party's leading bloggers before they agreed to a rescheduled YouTube debate. Even then, the GOP candidates insisted on seeing the questions in advance before answering them on live television.  With authenticity and transparency key traits that Millennials seek in candidates, this unwillingness to put it all out there continues to drive young voters into the hands of the Democratic Party.

In a January 2008 national online survey conducted by the Millennial Strategy Program of media research firm, Frank N. Magid Associates, 48% of Millennials say they expect to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee this November, while only half as many (24%) plan to vote for the Republican. By a similar 2:1 margin, Millennials also say that they're likely to vote for the Democratic over the Republican congressional candidate in their district (46% vs. 23%).

A few weeks ago I took a look at examples of unions using Facebook, partially inspired by Change to Win's Smack the CEO Facebook application.  Over the last few days, a mini-revolt of sorts has rolled through the Facebook labor activist community, and I've got good news: our side won!

The story begins with Derek Blackadder, a Canadian labor activist.  Blackadder tried using Facebook to organize a group of workers as his friend, and ran up against Facebook's friend limits.  Despite Derek's best efforts to stay within the bounds of Facebook's rules, he was eventually and summarily banned from the social network.  John Wood, an activist in London, sprang to Blackadder's defense, posting to his blog about the story and eventually starting a Facebook group to petition for reinstatement.  Eric Lee, who helps run LabourStart, sent an email to LabourStart readers encouraing them to join the group and email Facebook administrators.

The response was quick and effective.  Within eight hours of Lee's email, over 2,400 Facebook users signed up for the group (membership now stands at 2,683).  Within a day, Blackadder had been reinstated.

Via Facebook:

Subject: Vote TODAY!

Thank you for your support for my election campaign. It has meant so much to me. Now the day we have all been waiting for, Election Day, is finally here! Here's what you need to know about voting today.

Polls are open from 6:30am - 7:30pm. Please be sure to be in line by 7:30pm, and don't forget to bring ID!

Find your polling place: http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sosapps/elect ions/pollinglocationquery.aspx

As our Senator Sherrod Brown said this weekend, if you can get 5 people to vote today, it will actually matter. Please, contact your neighbors, friends and family and make sure they vote today too.

Let's go vote!

P.S. If you want to volunteer for my campaign today, please stop by the office anytime at 116 S. Main, Bowling Green or call 419-352-1583. To sign up for phonebanking from home, email phonebank4robin@gmail.com.

Robin Weirauch's Facebook group has used Facebook wisely, creating a sort of up to the minute OH-05 information and content hub that is also able to disseminate information simply and quickly. It will no doubt serve as a model for how campaigns can exploit social networking sites next year.

This isn't exactly a full-blown labor links roundup, but I've recently found a couple examples of unions using Facebook in interesting ways, and I thought I'd share them here.

First is Change to Win's Facebook app, Smack the CEO.  Written by CtW online communications director Jason Lefkowitz, Smack the CEO is a fairly straightforward game that allows you to compare your salary to that of prominent union-busting CEOs.  When you sign up, the app asks for your salary.  After signing up, you're asked to invite friends to join you in the game.  As you recruit more friends to the application, their salaries add up; hopefully, after recruiting about a bazillion friends, your combined salaries add up to the CEO's.  For disclosure's sake - I've worked with Jason a bit on fine-tuning the instructions and help text for this application, so I have a bit of a stake in its success (although not a monetary one).  Although at first I was a little put off by the way it asks for your salary up front, more and more I think it's appropriate.  The most popular Facebook applications are really, really simple - they basically involve ornamenting your profile, playing a game, or dressing up the traditional Facebook wall/poke mechanism.  This application falls into the game genre squarely, and still it manages to a) educate Facebook users about the wage gap, and b) give users some idea of what union organizing is actually about - adding up enough of your friends to take on powerful people.  That's pretty impressive, considering the fairly rigid formula for success as a Facebook application.

Incidentally, Jason and I have discussed using Facebook for more elaborate quasi-organizing.  I'd really like to see something like that take shape.  For example, I'd love to see a some kind of widget which allows coworkers to gripe about work online, perhaps with some anonymization to prevent recriminations at work.  Or I'd love to see a "sign a union card" Facebook application, perhaps similar to Younionize but with the advantage of higher exposure.  I've suggested similar kinds of approaches to online union organizing before, but I think it would take a fairly sophisticated online community builder to make it work, since my hunch is that most people are generally very cautious about openly discussing work gripes online.

The second example of unions using Facebook recently was this clever guerrilla event which takes advantage of Facebook's new Pages feature.  The idea is to support the WGA strike by signing up as a fan of one of the shows which is currently on strike; I chose The Office.  Once the friend request is approved, you can pursue all kinds of mayhem, light writing comments on the show's wall, or changing your user photo to some graphic which indicates your support of the writers.  Of course, the idea is to embarrass the networks and encourage them to negotiate in good faith already.  This is a pretty simple idea, but I think it could have some potential.  Why not replicate this same tactic with WalMart, Verizon Wireless, American Eagle, or FedEx - all of which are currently targets of various union campaigns?  Moreover, it seems to me that this kind of campaign opens up a new avenue in eActivism applications.  Currently eActivism for non-profit advocacy organizations is limited to some pretty simple functionality - make a donation, signup for an email list, send an email to your congress person, and sign a petition (and actually, those last three actions are pretty much identical).  But why not expand the capabilities of non-profit eActivism applications to include this kind of Facebook activism?  It'll be interesting to see if the large non-profit web developers like Convio, Kintera or Grassroots Enterprise pick up the slack on this.

Finally, while it's not on Facebook, I encourage you to take American Rights at Work's FedUp with FedEx pledge: don't ship with FedEx this holiday season, unless they change their union-busting ways and allow their drivers to unionize.

Anything else interesting in the world of labor on the intertubes?  Add a link in the comments!

This could be really fun:

Facebook, the popular social networking site, has become a full-fledged platform for communicating, sharing and advertising. ABC News is betting that it will become a platform for political coverage, as well.

ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership -- the site's first with a news organization -- that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new "U.S. Politics" category.

To underscore their collaboration, the two organizations will announce today that they are jointly sponsoring Democratic and Republican presidential debates in New Hampshire on Jan. 5, three days before the primary election there.

It looks like that first week of January is going to pretty jam packed, with not only Iowa holding its caucuses on Thursday the third and New Hampshire its primary on Tuesday the eighth but Facebook and ABC News holding both a Democratic and a Republican debate on Saturday the fifth. With the results of Iowa fresh in the minds of the political press and voters come the weekend, this debate is likely going to hold a great deal of importance, either reinforcing the results from the third or potentially helping someone hurt during the first nominating contest right their course. Additionally, the timing of these debates could further sideline Wyoming, which intends to hold a GOP caucus that day. Should be an interesting event, to say the least, and we at MyDD will hopefully have someone out there to cover it.

Anyway, consider this an open thread... What's on your mind tonight?

Cross-posted from the Rock the Vote Blog

The media has been touting the phenomenal growth of Stephen Colbert's Facebook group, which was created by high school student Raj Vachhani after Colbert announced his plan to run for president in South Carolina. In a mere eight days the group boasted a million members, and is currently shooting above 1.2 million.

Aside from an amazing membership count, this pop culture phenomenon has made a real political impact: more than 4,300 members have registered to vote via the group since Vachhani added a link to Rock the Vote on Thursday night (Oct. 24). That's about one registration per minute.

In fact, Rock the Vote's online registration capability is open to everyone. Sign up for a free account to track voter registrations through your own blog or website. We'll generate an embeddable registration form (aka "widget") that you can customize with a logo, and you'll even have access to the list of people you register so you can remind them to vote on Election Day.

Sound cool? Try it out. We would love to hear your feedback, too. Of course, you can always post a simple link to our online registration page if you prefer.