Network Effects On Our Elections
When it comes to presidential elections, there is no doubt that social media plays a huge role in the way citizens perceive the candidates up for election. We can imagine every event as having a signal effect for each citizen who witnesses it. So a video of a candidate leaking in which they refer to grabbing certain body parts, or a leak of a candidate taking money from special interest groups, would provide a negative signal. While a tv commercial of a candidate being shown in a good light, or a twitter post of a candidate saving a cat from a tree would be a positive signal. The problem we must ask ourselves is at what point does the signal become irrelevant and network pressures begin to cause a cascade effect?
With social networks such as Twitter providing immediate access to information and news, we may be putting ourselves into bubbles by choosing to only follow people of a certain belief system: liberals, conservatives, or otherwise, and after a certain period of time, we may be placed in such a bubble that we refuse to take any signal we might perceive and instead make all our decisions based on our social network ties. I have seen many people on Facebook get into fights and block one another for having opposing political views. It seems that even if someone is open minded about hearing multiple viewpoints, companies such as Facebook create algorithms that add bias into the equation for which posts people see. So someone who starts seeing more liberal posts than conservative ones may begin to adopt the liberal agenda over time, possibly with little to no question about the logical impact of the evidence. And likewise with conservatives and their social network ties.
Many liberals at Cornell said they had no idea that Trump would win because their networks all provided negative signals about the candidate. And when the Republican candidate won, the Democrats labeled his supporters the “silent majority.” Maybe liberals would not consider it a silent majority if we we’re immune to network cascade effects. Maybe then we would just consider Trump supporters simply: the majority.
http://www.cio.com/article/3137513/social-networking/twitters-impact-on-2016-presidential-election-is-unmistakable.html