In the past decade, the United States had been impacted drastically using technology in politics. The presidential campaign was affected significantly in the election of 2016. The three major candidates impacted the most were Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Gary Johnson. The main candidate who spread his campaign is a man who had possibly influenced extremely controversial policies, the one who fulfilled the social media completion is Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s campaign used social media as a vital backbone for their supporters. Trump executed and dominated social media into his way of winning the presidency. He focused on spreading his campaign through the users of these sites to get more votes. The Trump campaign’s use of faulty sources is detrimental to American democracy. Social media had affected the way the president has been elected because of the number of people that are online today. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, Reddit, blogs, etc. are examples of the social media used in this generation. Anyone who actively participates in or just observes political discourse is aware that on these sites of the toxicity coming from fake news and faulty narratives. The United States politics is significantly affected by Donald Trump persuaded countless people throughout this election using social media connecting the alt right, fake news and internet memes to execute his victory in this election.
“The “Alternative Right,” or more commonly, the “alt right” is a diverse assortment of people, mostly online, who identify as right-wingers but consider themselves either opposed to, or profoundly alienated from mainstream American conservatism — usually because they view it as being too liberal, or preoccupied with the wrong issues.” (McCullough) The alt right is an important righteous organic movement on the internet that has goals of combating feminism, Islam, and political correctness. The reason of the alt right is to protect the ideals of “white nationalists”. In general, they want to preserve white culture and/or western culture. Their objective is that they want to empower populist authoritarian government leaders. The internet is the platform and crucial ingredient of the memes, trolling campaigns, and Photoshop to spread the alt right. Infinites such as breitbart.com. Breitbart is a website that was created and founded in 2007 by a former liberal who became a conservative standard bearer, Andrew Breitbart. The Breitbart News Network is a conservative news website and became very popular with this recent election. (Bromwich) Another website used is called “The Daily Stormer” (“America’s #1 trusted republican news source”) and “The Right Stuff” blog. Also, viewers can see the alt right spread through social media such as Reddit, YouTube, and essentially Facebook. The alt right coalesced around the republican president Donald Trump. Trump campaigns a lot of disrespect to women, Latinos, Muslims and his far-right wing policy proposal on immigration, labor and social issues, civil liberties, environment, etc. Trump claims he doesn’t know anything about the alt right, so no one knows for a fact if he is lying or if he is simply ignorant to the significant sack of his supporters. Donald Trump is related to this issue of social media because the alt right troll group has adopted Trump as a hero on social media. This movement as a big vague collection of online posters defiantly has its routes to its sensation around Ron Pauls’ president run in 2012 also, but the creation of the alt right is usually attributed to a blogger/podcaster named Richard Spencer. Blogs and podcasts can generally be put in the topic of social media. These had a huge impact to voters today and how they used this information into the polls. Secondly, a social network called “Gab” whose logo is not a blue bird, but a Pepe frog. This network was created because Twitter had banned Breitbart’s Twitter page. (Wilson) Twitter had banned all alt right profile accounts associated with the movement. Social media service had stated it would crack down on hate speech now. “In a statement, Twitter said: “The Twitter Rules prohibit targeted abuse and harassment, and we will suspend accounts that violate this policy”” (Guynn). Also, per Guynn, he believed that twitter was the platform of choice for the campaign of President Donald Trump and the alt right political movement that embraced him. As todays generations, have come and go, the Twitter rules have changed. Twitter first stated when they were first created that they were “the free speech wing of the free speech party”. Twitter than realized that there was a dramatic rise in abuse, harassment and hate speech. People of society on Twitter think that they are acting upon the right to free speech, but people are forgetting that they sign up for this social network and if they use Twitter, they must go by their rules; meanwhile hate speech is a crime. The alt right as a whole is a homemade group attempt to rebrand and legitimize white supremacy, misogamy, and anti-Semitism with a tech savvy twist through the mindless celebration of infiltrating trolling, the reposting of plagiarizing memes, and the copying and pasting of pepe the frog.
The alternative right also leads to the topic of fake news. Fake news is a phenomenon that has increased within this year because of the election. Most of this false news is spread through social media. A man who created a network that probably never thought that his idea would lead to the cause of an election, Mark Zuckerberg; an American computer programmer who invented the social networking site Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook recently came under fire from people saying they did very little to stop internet hoaxes. Many people of today’s society said that Zuckerberg and Facebook are to blame for this election. He responded in a way, that all his employees were suddenly surprised by his comments. Zuckerberg explained that he thinks more than ninety nine percent of the content on Facebook is authentic and only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. He believes that internet hoaxes do exist but they do not relate to politics and couldn’t have changed the outcome of the election. He also said, “While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted.” Many of Facebook employees disagree with what he said (Ohlheiser). This brings a 38-year-old male named Paul Horner into perspective. This man is the writer of a Facebook fake-news empire. He had admitted to writing fake news articles and posting them on Facebook and other online sites. His explanation for writing these fake news articles were that he was proving a point of Trump supporters. He stated, “Honestly people are definitely dumber, they just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact checks anything anymore – I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted and people believed everything and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.” This right here may seem to be an opinion, but he is the author of the fake news and did not write any facts, so he proved a point that the Trump supporters did not fact check and believes the fake news he posted to the internet. Horner does not like Trump and never thought writing fake news would ever change the outcome the world thought was going to happen (Hillary Clinton winning the election). Google has stated that because of fake news they are turning off the “money hose” and moving forward while restricting ad serving on pages that post fake news. They are taking the ads off these websites. Per the author who interviewed Horner, Caitlin Dewey, she had asked Horner if he was worried about this. Horner thinks that they will probably crack down on certain sites but they are going to lose a lot of money by doing this. Which means that there will still be certain cites and fake news spread across social media (Dewey). There has been a research of nearly sixty fake online news sites and forty four percent of Americans get their news from Facebook. Sixty two percent of adults go to a social site for a go to news report. Facebook has about 1.8 billion members and on Twitter Donald Trump has 16.4 million followers. Almost nearly all of them see and follow his tweets (Swartz and Cava). Top right-wing Facebook news outlets published false or misleading stories thirty eight percent of the time while top left-wing post twenty percent of fake news*. Facebook had human editors that work on their trending topics, but then there were accusations that they were leaning towards the left and they fired the human editors, which caused the fake news stories to run rampant. The Trump supporters have believed most of the fake news statistically because of the outcome of the election.
Internet memes are a ginormous sensation around the entire globe today. Social networks such as Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, 4chan, etc. has blown up in reflecting candidates’ campaigns. There is a special website made in our present year 2016 where the trends of memes are monitored and voted upon favorites called “Electmeme”. Statistically Trump had also dominated the board on the meme race. Candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had an absurd number of memes, Trump took the gold on that race too (Paul). Memes have taken things to a whole other level. Some refer to the holocaust or the deaths of black Americans. “After the millionaire founder of the Oculus virtual reality headset company Palmer Luckey, admitted he donated money to a group looking to fund online smear attacks via memes of Clinton.” This was responsible of a billboard in Pittsburg, which later seemed to decrease the number of democratic votes in the final election polls. Hillary did not win Pennsylvania which shocked the country. The power of a meme is under estimated. The use of Pepe the frog has been added to the list of hate symbols to the Anti-Defamation League. Mostly memes are used by social media users, but one of the very of candidates before his prior election to President, he posted a meme himself on the social media app Instagram (Chmielewski). In an interview to be broadcasted on “60 Minutes” Donald Trump admitted to social media playing a key role in this election. “I think it helped me win all of those races where (they were) spending much more money than I spent,” he said. “And I won. I think that social media has more power than the money they spent, and I think maybe to a certain extent, I proved that.” (@newsmax). Here, Trump confidentially knows he ruled social media during the election and he is very proud of it. What he doesn’t know is all the fake news spread to get his “intelligent” supporters to vote for him. He doesn’t know that the most of his voters were believing everything they saw on social media and never fact checked it. All he knows is that internet memes were used for his “advantage” of winning the election.
Throughout the election the use by the alt right of fake news and internet memes for Donald trump had successfully convinced a myriad number of American citizens throughout the election ominously using social media. The social networks of today’s society are the main basis and platform of the movement of the alt right. The alt right accepted Donald Trump and saw him as a hero. This was expressed through the internet successfully benefiting Trump in the election. Fake news was a detrimental fall of this past election, but was a benefit for Trump. The democratic party may have failed, but they have a chance to investigate how Trump won. In addition, the liberals did prove the point of statistically showing that Trump voters did not fact check the news that they were seeing on social media. Lastly, internet memes were always a joke to society, but this joke has completely turned into an impact of today’s politics.