Social Media Manipulation In The 2016 Election

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Social Media manipulation has a beneficial impact on the 2016 election due to increasing participation in the 2016 election. Much of the news related to presidential candidate was learned about there social media. The three social media sites that manipulated the presidential election were the following: Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. Facebook, according to direction Katie Harbath, plays the following role: “"And the campaigns seeing the greatest success on the platform are those that are really taking advantage of that by reaching out and having an actual, two-way dialogue with voters” (SOURCE). The conversation is happing on Facebook: this social media site is being used by presidential candidates to actively engage with the public to get …show more content…

Social media has a different structure than previous media outlets used during political elections, and anything content that is posted on these sites is not directly filtered or fact-checked to see if they information its completely accurate. This could lead to fake news, defined as, “to be news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers” (SOURCE). Fake news can have polticial implications, and these implications were seen during the 2016 US presidential election. Recent evidence that was published in Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzhow’s journal article shows that, “1) 62 percent of US adults get news on social media (Gottfried and Shearer 2016); 2) the most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories (Silverman 2016); 3) many people who see fake news stories report that they believe them (Silverman and Singer-Vine 2016)” (SOURCE). The circulation of fake news on social media impacted now only they way social media conveyed information, but it impacted what people believed in. This study shows that fake news did play a factor in manipulating people during this 2016 presidential election since the majority of people who read this news believed what they were reading. In these …show more content…

Fake news on social media was on these sites, and determining how much fake news was there with respect to how much it was read will help one conclude the influence fake news had on people. Allcott and Gentzhow conducted a survey and concluded the following results, “After weighting for national representativeness, 15 percent of survey respondents recalled seeing the Fake stories, and 8 percent both recalled seeing the story and said they believed it” (SOURCE). Having this high of a percentage believing fake news stories shows that social media was not used banefully to convey the right information to the public. When citizens are exposed to this information, it would have been used to sway their political behaviors and opinions about a particular candidates. The survey conducted by Allcott and Gentzhow also found that, “Given that the Fake articles in our database had 38 million Facebook shares, this implies that the average adult saw and remembered 0.03/million × 38 million ≈ 1.14 fake news articles from our fake news database” (SOURCE). Not only were there over millions of shares on Facebook publicizing this fake news, people on these sites, on average would read at least one fake news article before voting in the 2016 US

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