Facebook and Democracy in 2016
The media — the one thing that both sides in the 2016 Presidential Race criticized and continue to alienate. The love affair that society used to have with instant, 24/7 coverage and never ending salacious stories seems to be ending.
A Washington Times article describes the flurry of news coverage of the 2016 election as a combination of “inaccuracies, melodrama, bias, outrage” that is turning people on both sides of the aisle away from the media. Facebook, in particular, has been accused of spreading fake news that hurt both sides. This fake news could have influenced American voter’s decision as to who to vote for or even the decision to vote.
As a college student, sometimes the place I’m getting most of my news is Facebook. However, the problem with this is a lot of the stories that got shared were either very anti-Hillary or very anti-Trump. And while I can respect the views of people on both sides, I think that this election showed a fundamental flaw: that we would rather support one candidate because we absolutely hate everything about the other candidate, and social media created the perfect platform for this. The feeling of respect for two people, running for the highest office in our country was gone, a particularly disheartening fact to me as a first time voter.
From growing up in Seattle, an extremely liberal city, and coming to North Carolina for college, my Facebook feed featured support for both candidates. However, very few of these posts focused on anything past taglines, such as “We’re going to build a wall” and “What about the emails” From these posts I had no idea how each of the candidates planned to deal with economic policy, foreign policy, or healthcare.
This election belittled both candidates and produced an outcome that has given rise to protests all over the country. However the part of this that is most frustrating to me is that voter turnout was significantly lower in 2016 than in both 2012 and 2008. If an election result, where either the victory of either candidate would enrage the other side, why did so few vote? And while I don’t have an answer for this, I think that Facebook and other social media sites that morphed two candidates into two super villains fighting to see who is the least evil, showed people, and specifically my generation, that it was okay not to vote, to not to get involved, because each candidate is a bad person with no business being president so really, it didn’t matter which one won.
As someone who did vote, I was surprised when I found out that my friends who were complaining about the result of the election did not even vote because they were from a “Blue State” or “Red State” so there was no point. After thinking about this more though, I realized I understood where they were coming from. The media focuses only on swing states, the states that can go either way and hold the right amount of electoral college votes to give a candidate a healthy lead. They paint the picture that the votes in those states will determine the election, and yeah to a certain degree they do, but that does not mean that someone should give up their right to vote. In my opinion, I think Facebook and other social media did a disservice by making people think this election was somehow unimportant and not worth spending the time to vote and instead just complaining about each side and deepening divisions.
