Facebook has come under fire for its election plans to try to encourage voting - and mine its users data for political preferences. The firm announced plans to mine data of millions of American voters, just as an experiment which tried to encourage people to vote was disclosed. The data mining is likely to prove controversial as it adds to the amount Facebook knows about its users - although the company itself says that the data is anonymized before being processed. The move was announced as a controversial 2010 study has been revealed called 'A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization,'.
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The social media site will mine data from users 18 and older, using sentiment analysis and will allow  outlets to sort by categories like gender and location
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Controversial 2010 study called 'A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization' under fire
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A recently release Pew study found that an large amount of web users get news from Facebook
As part of the study, Facebook put different forms of an 'I'm Voting' button on the pages of about 60 million of its @placeholder users.