There's a joke quote circulating on Facebook that goes like this: "'Your relentless political Facebook posts finally turned me around to your way of thinking,' said nobody, ever."

The funny thing is, that might not actually be true.

"People whose friends post some (or a lot of) political content on social networking sites are much more likely to say that they have changed their mind about a political issue or become more involved with a political issue after reading/discussing them on a social network (compared with people whose friends don’t post much political content)," Aaron Smith, a senior researcher at Pew, told me Tuesday via email.

That's based on a study the Pew Internet & American Life Project released on Tuesday that explored how social network users feel about political content on the sites they use. And of course, it comes with a few caveats.

"I don’t want to make too much of this correlation," Smith wrote to me. "If you replace 'my friends post about politics on social networking sites' with 'I talk about politics a lot in general' or 'I personally post lots of political material on SNS' you see pretty much exactly the same relationship. Put simply, people with greater exposure to (and interest in) political chatter on online social networks are more likely to change their mind or take action as a result (regardless of who that chatter comes from)."

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