The Role of Facebook in the 2016 Election
In the days immediately following the 2016 presidential election, Facebook drew criticism over its involvement in distributing fake news articles to its users. Allegedly, this ultimately had an effect on the outcome of the election. A New York Times article investigated the reasons behind the decisions of six voters on Election Day. Many of the Democrats interviewed tended to have many Facebook friends who were also Democrats but very few Republican friends. Similarly, most of the Republicans had friends who were mostly Republicans and only a small number of friends who were Democrats. While the article interviewed only a handful of voters, it illustrates how easy it can be to surround yourself with people who think like you, and separate yourself from different perspectives.
Presumably, this “filter bubble” enabled an information cascade that helped spread misinformation across social networks. Once these fake news articles were shared by individuals on Facebook, they became accessible to an audience of potentially tens of millions of other individuals. Because many individuals on Facebook largely interact with individuals who share similar beliefs, this misinformation was able to spread across the network particularly effectively, reaching a receptive audience that further helped in spreading the misinformation to other parts of the network.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/us/red-blue-and-divided-six-views-of-america.html