How Facebook shapes the 2016 election
Social Media has been significant platform on the flow of information. In particular, Facebook is major platform that allow president candidates to attract more voters to support them. A article shows that the Facebook can have an impact that how propaganda/ information can be spreaded and possibility change the inclination of your voting another candidate based on your friends’ news feeds. Most importantly, some people questions can Facebook actually effect candidates presidency based on their algorithms? Since we have lots of Facebook friends, we could be affected by our friends’ posts, because Information Cascade is playing big part on social media site.
If you decide to let the Facebook display you have voted, you friends are able to view it, then Facebook would encourage your friends to vote as well. In this case, Information cascade plays a big part in it because Facebook’s algorithm choose to show you the friends’ status about the election votes. For example, if you are that kind of person follow the election closely and view those opinions posted by your friends, you are most likely be influenced to make decision by them. On the article, facebook COO says they have no control on cascade information. Yet, the facebook could still effect the outcome because the algorithm can somehow effect how to spread the information that we don’t know.
The interesting phenomenon was most of people publicly vote or support Clinton as poll showed on TV, however we know the face that Trump won the election. Therefore, sometimes Information Cascade can lead to wrong prediction. However, we never underestimate the powerful influence of Cascade.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/how-facebook-could-tilt-the-2016-election-donald-trump/478764/