Falsehoods Still Find A Home On Facebook: In Memes, In Groups.

My Experience in Political Facebook Groups in the Age of Trump

By Jordan Winters

Facebook Groups is a feature that makes the social site a very powerful organizing tool. Instagram and Twitter lack anything comparable.

I was curious whether there were any differences between what was on my homepage, and what showed up in the newsfeeds of some of these groups.

I subscribed to a bunch.

They were from all ends of the spectrum — from “DEPLORABLE US For TRUMP!” to “Christians Against Trump/Christians Against Hate”.

My interest was not initially in how people responded in the comments, or in what kind of culture these groups fostered, but how they relayed information.

Each group differed in how much they used more mainstream sites with sites that I had never heard of. But what was consistent (and surprising) was that memes had an overwhelming presence and therefore influence on the groups.

And many of the memes were misleading.

Even a group “Black Conservatives for Truth” that specifies that “anyone who refuses to look at all available information objectively and hold our nation’s leaders accountable, critique and criticize their every move, is being irresponsible with their freedom and should be questioned about their agenda” still posted this meme:

The most recent data that I could find from the Guttmacher Institute says that African-American women do have higher rates of abortion than white women. By my calculations then about 260,000 abortions not 90,000 were performed on African-American women in 2014.

While memes are easy to spot, the eye-catching nature of memes may be responsible for high engagement. In “Christians Against Trump/Christians Against Hate” a meme with Trump and Obama got over 300 comments and 200 likes while the Vox article right underneath it received only a fraction of the engagement.

While this certainly wasn’t how it went for every post, there was also little effort to curb their presence. “Black Conservatives for Truth” was the only group who said it attempted to limit false information but that didn’t seem to have an effect on the presence of memes in the group’s feed.

In the group “Christians Against Trump,” there were two memes that were posted back to back in different forms that have been proven false. Both are about the term “snowflake” and says it originates in Nazi Germany.

You can see the comments in the image from people who were skeptical of this memes and asked for a fact check.

I looked this up, and found that the link between Nazi Germany and the term “snowflakes” has been debunked by Snopes.

Memes have elbowed their way onto my homepage for years now; however, I began to wonder if there is a difference between sharing Arthur memes about Harambe and seeing them in a Facebook community that you’ve joined to be politically involved — especially when they seem designed to spread misinformation or inflame emotions.

Annenberg Media’s Truthsquad has launched it’s podcast where we discuss being journalists in this new era. Take a listen!