Why Facebook Is Accused Of Having Influenced Donald Trump’s Victory?
It is almost a year since Donald Trump defied all odds to emerge as winner of the 2016 US Presidential election ahead of Hillary Clinton. This notorious victory has been attributed to a lot of factors and Facebook, for instance, has been variously accused of playing a part in it. There are some very salient reasons behind the accusation against Facebook and even as CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, tries to deny the claims, they continue to gain more acceptance.
It has been argued that Trumps rise was aggressively fuelled by Facebook through the circulation of ‘Fake news’ on political topics that tipped the scale in Trumps favour. This issue of fake news continues to pose as a major problem with Facebook as Huffington Post investigation noted that hoaxes and misinformation still show up frequently in the ‘Trending Topics’ and ‘News Feed’ sections of the social media platform.
This, however, does not suggest in any way that Facebook intentionally promoted Fake news, but it calls to question the algorithm used for the News Feed section of Facebook, which is central to the way information and news is consumed today.
The algorithm ensures that people are shown updates, comments, news stories and advertisement that they will like, based on the contents they have previously interacted with. This further ensures that people are most likely going to see topics they agree with politically before they see topics that disagree on it. It also means that people who have formed their politically opinions based on falsehood will likely not find enough sound information displace the false opinion.
Generally, Facebook’s contribution to the victory of Mr. Trump is tied to its inability to control ‘Fake news’. According to New York Magazine, “the most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news.”
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