How Did Silicon Valley Influence the 2016 U.S. Election?

The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election was arguably one of the most divisive political elections in recent history.

It was also one of the most unique elections in terms of technology. While social media existed during the 2012 election, it wasn’t until 2016 that the full power of the internet was realised by politicians in the United States who began focusing on social media as another platform to spread their campaign messages.

Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Google played key roles in the election, with social media websites becoming the chief political battlegrounds during the election. Facebook groups such as the Hillary Clinton supporting “Pantsuit Army” rose to prominence while the Donald Trump fan club known as The_Donald bombarded the front page of Reddit. Donald Trump utilised Twitter’s short and concise format to tweet significant campaign news updates late in the night while Hillary Clinton’s digital campaign strategists did their level best to make her seem more relatable to younger voters.

Throughout all of this, social media platforms became involved in politics on a fundamental level, offering livestreams of campaign rallies, running polls and votes across their platform and offering custom hashtags for political events. However, despite their involvement many refused to believe that social media could actually be used to shape the U.S. election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outright refused to accept that his website could play a part in a larger political scheme calling the idea “crazy.”

However, in 2018 the Facebook CEO was called to appear before Congress relating to user data breach issues, one of the key allegations was that this user data was utilised during the 2016 election to target advertising and sway voter decision.

Suddenly the idea that sites such as Facebook and Twitter could affect the U.S. Presidential election didn’t seem so absurd.

This feature series aims to explore precisely how social media affected the 2016 election, how these communication platforms were subverted and the consequences of allowing Silicon Valley tech giants to operate with no oversight.

Each article will focus on a specific digital platform and it’s effect on the election. The three platform’s investigated will be Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com