Working with a tiny budget that would have allowed them to send a single mailer to just 150,000 households, the digital-advertising firm Chong and Koster was able to obtain remarkable results. In late 2014, The Daily Dot called attention to an obscure Facebook-produced case study on how strategists defeated a statewide measure in Florida by relentlessly focusing Facebook ads on Broward and Dade counties, Democratic strongholds. (He also suggested that Facebook be seen as an “information fiduciary,” charged with certain special roles and responsibilities because it controls so much personal data.) In June 2014, Harvard Law scholar Jonathan Zittrain wrote an essay in New Republic called, “ Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out,” in which he called attention to the possibility of Facebook selectively depressing voter turnout. And the pro-liberal effect it implied became enshrined as an axiom of how campaign staffers, reporters, and academics viewed social media. The research showed that a small design change by Facebook could have electoral repercussions, especially with America’s electoral-college format in which a few hotly contested states have a disproportionate impact on the national outcome.
The potential for Facebook to have an impact on an election was clear for at least half a decade. And because a higher proportion of young people vote Democratic than the general population, the net effect of Facebook’s GOTV effort would have been to help the Dems.
Fowler told Rosen that it was “even possible that Facebook is completely responsible” for the youth voter increase. Again, the conclusion of their work was that Facebook’s get-out-the-vote message could have driven a substantial chunk of the increase in youth voter participation in the 2012 general election. Rebecca Rosen’s 2012 story, “ Did Facebook Give Democrats the Upper Hand?” relied on new research from Fowler, et al., about the presidential election that year. In that year, a combined University of California, San Diego and Facebook research team led by James Fowler published a study in Nature, which argued that Facebook’s “I Voted” button had driven a small but measurable increase in turnout, primarily among young people. We’ve known since at least 2012 that Facebook was a powerful, non-neutral force in electoral politics. The informational underpinnings of democracy have eroded, and no one has explained precisely how. The real problem-for all political stripes-is understanding the set of conditions that led to Trump’s victory. It’s not that this hypothetical perfect story would have changed the outcome of the election. Every component of the chaotic digital campaign has been reported on, here at The Atlantic, and elsewhere: Facebook’s enormous distribution power for political information, rapacious partisanship reinforced by distinct media information spheres, the increasing scourge of “viral” hoaxes and other kinds of misinformation that could propagate through those networks, and the Russian information ops agency.īut no one delivered the synthesis that could have tied together all these disparate threads.
Reporters tried to see past their often liberal political orientations and the unprecedented actions of Donald Trump to see how 2016 was playing out on the internet. Tech journalists covering Facebook had a duty to cover what was happening before, during, and after the election.
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