Facebook Elections

For the last week or so, we've been discussing how social media influences our spending. Since many of us in the class are aware of the power of Facebook, I thought this Buzzfeed article on the 2016 elections would be appropriate. Personally, I do not engage in political discussions (and am often way out of my comfort zone when people bring up the topic) but this article was simple enough to understand the shift in advertisements regarding elections.

Rather than spending multi-million dollars on a television ads, the political parties will focus more time on social media, specifically Facebook. As the writer Ben Smith states, "the way people share will shape the outcome of the presidential election". In two years, I suspect more people will be influenced by social media than through TV/paper ads or even word of mouth. 

The amount of people discussion their political views on Facebook has contributed to a new research branch called "sentiment analysis". This statistical analysis method is hoping to predict the election results based off of people's writings on Facebook. Like advertising, statistical analysis is using what Facebook users post in order to stereotype them, placing them into certain political groups. According to Smith, a flaw in this method is that the programs are unable to detect sarcasm. But then again, even humans find it hard to detect through text. Another thing to note is that the Facebook population is only a sample size, not population size. This skewed sample is not representative of everyone who is able to and will vote during the 2016 election.

A small detail that I encountered in this article was that Facebook would maintain anonymity and will not share results to groups under one thousand people. Translation: no go to small companies, yes go to big companies that pay big bucks. Like the articles that we read last week addressing anonymity, big companies like Facebook claim to protect our personal information. However, our information, in this case political standpoint, will be sold to large companies for large sums... all in the name of political research. Once again, social media users are the easy targets of large markets, in this case: politics. 

Interesting note: there is a red box at the bottom that says "you need to accept third-party cookies in your browser (aka advertisements) in order to comment using this social plugin (Facebook)". Social media is always linked to  advertisements. But then again, that is how they choose profit.