Did Social Media Rig the Presidential Election?

by Alex Nnabue ‘18

Harambe, the gorilla who was shot by a zoo ofcial, earned over 11,000 of the popular vote for U.S. president. Denzel Washington and the Pope endorsed Donald Trump. The top result on a Google search for “ national election count” declared that Trump led in the popular vote. There is only one problem with these stories: all of them are hoaxes that trended on social media and websites.

With the rise of social media in political discourse, there has been a significant increase in articles published by websites that specialize in producing fictional news. Following the presidential campaign, the role of social media is being increasingly scrutinized.

Critics have contended that a Facebook timeline conforms to one’s political views based on their activity, creating an echo-chamber that allows misinformation similar to one’s beliefs to appear. The current algorithm used by Facebook does not use human editors, and will accept any trending topic if it is linked to at least three recent articles or an article with related posts, regardless of reliability.

Experts claim numerous inaccurate and politically biased news articles that surfed the web through “echo-chambers” potentially swayed the election outcome in Trump’s favor. In response to the criticism, Face- book, Twitter, and Google made public statements with the intent to prevent the widespread use of unreliable news sources.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially refuted the argument that the growing popularity of false articles on his site contributed to Trump’s win. Zuckerberg’s Facebook post on November 12 contended that “of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic,” while he believes the company helped “more than 2 million people register to vote” as they were better informed and connected to politics.

Facebook is not the only company responding to criticism for its practices. Google’s Ad- Sense allows website publishers to place ads on their websites for revenue when people engage with them. Google informed the Wall Street Journal that it will prevent the appearance of ads “on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s con- tent, or the primary purpose.” The same day, Facebook faced more bad publicity and was pressured into following Google’s action by

restricting fake news sites from using its Facebook Audience Net- work.

Paul Horner, who specializes in spreading false and pro-Trump stories, is unsure whether he assisted in Trump’s victory. However, one of his hoaxes even earned a repost from Trump’s campaign manager. In a Washington Post interview he claimed that Americans “don’t fact-check anything —they’ll post everything, believe anything.”

Beyond the persuasiveness of fake news, there is concern that the use of social media has created a more divisive political environment. According to the Pew Re- search Center, 64 percent of U.S. adults use Facebook, and nearly half use it as their news source. Twitter projected over 1 billion tweets were sent pertaining to the election. Social media encourages the sharing of opinions, which has resulted in Twitter arguments and biased posts on timelines as people mute their peers for having opposing beliefs. Twitter recently expanded their mute control to enable users to censor keywords, phrases, and conversations from their news feed. The move aims to prevent the “trend of people taking advantage of that openness and using Twitter to be abusive to others,” according to a company statement.