Home > Media essays > How Social Media Was Used to Influence an Election

Essay: How Social Media Was Used to Influence an Election

Essay details and download:

  • Subject area(s): Media essays
  • Reading time: 6 minutes
  • Price: Free download
  • Published: 1 March 2022*
  • Last Modified: 31 July 2024
  • File format: Text
  • Words: 1,775 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 8 (approx)
  • Tags: Social media essays

Text preview of this essay:

This page of the essay has 1,775 words.

The Art of Deception: How Social Media Was Used to Influence an Election

We now live in an age where technology has taken over our lives. In today’s generation, most of the world’s population owns a smartphone or a computer, and these same people have access to various forms of social media. People are no longer just getting their news and information from books, newspapers and television anymore. Most people get their information and news from social media. In an article titled “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election” by Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, a study revealed 20 percent of people that undertook a survey said the information received online is not always reliable or even truthful, yet if people see a headline posted over and over they will begin to believe what they are reading.

After the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, we have learned that not everything we read on social media can be trusted. People may always believe things they read on social media and can be influenced in how they view politics or certain politicians. People that make these posts on social media may have a political agenda by messing with your perception of politics. With the 2020 election around the corner, I want to go back and look at how social media has had significant impacts on past two elections: 2016 Presidential elections and 2018 Congressional elections. So, the question I mean to ask in my paper is, “how did social media affect the voting process in the most recent U.S. elections?”

With the recent release of the Mueller Report titled “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election” drafted by special prosecutor Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors, it has been firmly established that Russia had used social media to influence the 2016 election. Russia was able to systematically infiltrate every aspect of social media to disrupt people’s perceptions of both candidates. The world may have a severe problem with how social media is being used in our lives, and not enough is being done to filter out the real from the fake. I aim to go in-depth on how social media has had an impact on our lives and how it can alter our perception of the world around us, especially our view on politics and elections. I would like to go back into the beginnings of social media and see how it was used in elections and to take note of how the use of social media has evolved as it gained more users and platforms. I feel that there is an excellent story to be told here and also a cautionary tale that has changed the landscape of how we view candidates in elections and the news we get that pertains to them.

Election interference is a fascinating subject that has significant relevance with the 2020 election right around the corner. Elections have long term consequences, and having an election influenced can have long-lasting effects because of who may have been elected. It has been disputed that the Russian interference in the 2016 election had any impact on the actual results. I hope that this paper can answer this question. It used to be before the invention of social media and even the internet that candidates needed to campaign in every state and rely on the mainstream media to get their messages across to the public. In this age of advanced technology, the landscape of elections has changed with the time in which we live. Social media gives candidates a direct line to the voters they are trying to attract. If this system is compromised like it was in 2016, it will again prove to be a dangerous weapon to outside actors who wish to do this country harm.

Literature Review

Social media impacted the 2016 United States elections. In essence, social media affects elections because it provides a platform through which electorates interact. A review of the literature shows that social media influences elections through facilitating candidates’ direct contact and engagement with voters, facilitation of campaign advertising and agenda customization to suit specific demographics, and through the creation and spread of fake online content and propaganda.

First, social media facilitated the candidates’ direct contact with electorates during the 2016 presidential campaigns. In essence, social media influences elections based on the particular frameworks of the social media platform that facilitate online interactions of users (Xenos, Macafee & Pole, 2017). Social media platform frameworks provide technical features that determine how people interact online. The technical features include a platform’s algorithmic filtering, network structure, date model, and functionality (Bossetta, 2018). As such, the frameworks initiate, shape, and control user behavior online. When campaign teams share content on social media platforms, electorates get to interact with the posts directly and give feedback accordingly. For instance, when a 13-second clip of Ted Cruz being denounced by Carly Fiorina, was shared by the Trump campaign team in 2016, the video got 1.5 million views on Facebook, 778,000 views on Twitter, and 676,000 views on Instagram (Bossetta, 2018). Therefore, social media provided an online means for candidates to interact with large numbers of electorates immediately.

Secondly, social media was used to create and spread fake online content, statistics, and propaganda. Manipulation of electorate perspectives about election candidate popularity is sharpened through social media. According to Metaxas and Mustafaraj (2012), propaganda uses web spams on social media like Twitter bombs that send unsolicited replies to social media users in a bid to divert their attention to particular election candidates. Additionally, the problem of manipulation is magnified by social media robots. By being embedded in networks, social media bots develop and propel hashtags that are quickly adopted by the public and other bots resulting in the modification of real electorates’ perspectives of reality about political affiliations. According to Bessa and Ferrara (2016), in the U.S. 2016 elections, approximately 25% of content generated about the elections were not from real humans but social media robots. Therefore, taking into account the fact that chain-reactions of social media users on online content are influenced by the frequency of timing and churning out of content, it is logical to conclude that robots negatively affected the integrity of the 2016 elections.

Finally, social media facilitated campaign advertising and political agenda customization to suit specific demographics in the 2016 elections. Through the social media platforms frameworks of algorithmic filtering and data, targeting specific audiences in social media platforms is enabled. Through algorithmic screening, posts selection, arrangement, and visibility are altered. While many platforms have a definite reach for posts in that they are confined within a person’s network, most of them like Facebook and Twitter provide overriding. Through overriding via algorithmic filtering, candidates in the 2016 U.S. elections advertised their campaigns on social media and boosted their posts, increasing visibility even outside their online networks (Bossetta, 2018). Moreover, the candidates customized their campaigns to specific audiences through the social media data framework that matched electorates to particular posts and analyzed electorate reactions.

In conclusion, the 2016 U.S. elections were influenced by social media. Because social media is built on algorithms, systematic modifications that allowed targeting of specific electorates and facilitation of interaction with robots, this all impacted perspectives of constituencies about candidates’ popularities. Therefore, social media influenced the 2016 U.S. elections through facilitating candidates’ direct contact and engagement with voters, campaign advertising, and the creation and spread of fake online content and propaganda using social media robots.

Americans with high political awareness can identify the factual news compared to those with low levels of political consciousness. Again, those that are technologically savvy are sure in the use of digital devices, unlike those that are not technically savvy. Republicans and Democrats deploy the tendency to be affected by which direction of the passage a statement appeals to most (Bessi, and Ferrara). When Americans incorrectly classify factual statement as perception, they disagree with it Experience in misleading communications is not identical to trust in them. The citizens would show gullibility and act in the manner that would help themselves from the false information. Citizens find information to be more believable the more familiar the data becomes, and so the repetition of the lies that were shared through the media motivates their receiving. Again, people believe information that confirms their political perceptions, without considering the power of the proof, and so the lies are likely to dominate. The lies threaten the roots of the fairness of a country since the citizens try to shape their social and political factors by participating in elections. Therefore, the lies from the political leaders reduce the level of fairness by disrupting their perceptions. Supporting a candidate depends on the citizens’ beliefs, and so the lies can encourage discernments hence leading them to support the leaders that could fake their self-regard.

The correct information can be used when confidential communication is forged hence casting an opponent in the opposite direction. After the U.S. 2016 elections, the survey shows that the Americans got to see the falsehoods doing the campaign period, and they were selective on which information they would trust. The false information was spread more than legitimate messages. Therefore, it is vital if citizens realize the political messages having little effects than other relevant details, hence reducing the vulnerability to democracy.

Americans answered similar survey questions during the election period. The surveys during the elections repeated the measures of social media support and the trusted accuracy, though they are distinct as per misperceptions evaluated. There was the direction on the candidates and the campaign matters’ misconceptions. The aim of this was to understand how then social media affects these two vital kinds of lies. The data was then analyzed using the panel data, in spite of the insufficient random assessment. Fixed representations types are commonly realized as invaluable tools for evaluating the panel information in the political sciences. These models treat the unobserved values as the steady features that control the effect of the unevaluated parameters in the outcomes of the assessments. The model coefficients are understood by elaborating the variation in the result variable that corresponds to the one-value change in the predictor holding continuous at all steady features of each respondent. Though it is impossible to assess the impacts of the time-variant variables, we can also measure whether the effects of the values that change with time are conditioned on the steady features via the correlation ways. Significance testing is performed through the high sureness intermissions for the forecasts concerning the contender principles with preceding resilient signifying that social media endorses candidate misunderstandings. These tests consume much sureness intermissions for the trusts of the campaigns concerning the significant doubt about the aim of the correlation.

2019-12-13-1576277554

Get help with your essay, dissertation or coursework:

Fields marked with an * are required


Get help from a PhD-qualified UK lecturer specialising in your field of study in as little as 4 office hours. We can provide essay writing services, dissertation writing services, marking, editing proofreading, research or any other type of academic support.

Discover more:

About this essay:

If you use part of this page in your own work, you need to provide a citation, as follows:

Essay Sauce, How Social Media Was Used to Influence an Election. Available from:<https://www.essaysauce.com/media-essays/how-social-media-was-used-to-influence-an-election/> [Accessed 21-12-24].

These Media essays have been submitted to us by students in order to help you with your studies.

* This essay may have been previously published on EssaySauce.com and/or Essay.uk.com at an earlier date than indicated.