The 2016 election was one of those “I remember where I was when this happened” moments. As I sat watching the polls, I remember thinking, “what is going on?” It seemed like everyone I knew was excited for a woman President, yet the poll results showed the opposite. Building up to this point, the nation was becoming even more divided and there was a lot of fact-checking going on because of what each candidate and their supporters were saying.
After the election, research showed that some articles and targeted advertising had non-factual statements about each party that compromised democracy by influencing how some users were voting.
George Soros thinks that Google and Facebook pose a larger menace to democracy than the Trump Administration: https://t.co/Yhv6XVljY9 pic.twitter.com/OJcYizccNV
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) January 28, 2018
George Soros, American-Hungarian investor and activist, claims that social media has certainly infringed on democracy and that it’s led to “Trump taking us on the path to nuclear war” (Cassidy, 2018).
Samidh Chakrabarti, product manager for Facebook, tells David Ingram of Reuters that Facebook “cannot guarantee Facebook is good for democracy” (Ingram, 2018). Chakrabarti also stated that Facebook has a “moral duty to understand how these technologies are being used and what can be done to make communities like Facebook as representative, civil and trustworthy as possible” (Ingram, 2018).
While Facebook is trying to be transparent, users are calling out Facebook, wanting real answers and solutions.
Twitter, like Facebook, under reports statistics. But this is less concerning that actual election voting tampering which occurred and is likely to recur. What is being done to prevent, to protect democracy?
— Sharon 📎🖖🏽🌎🌊💙🏳️🌈❄️ (@sharon_leff) January 28, 2018
So what is being done? Or rather, what can be done? Facebook says they are going to let users rank credibility of news (Frenkel & Maheshwari, 2018). To me, this sounds like “I don’t like what this article says, so it’s not credible.” Putting myself in Zuckerberg’s shoes, I cry for 20 minutes first, then I create a team of fact checkers and Silicon Valley’s top techs to sift through articles and advertisements, protecting users’ free speech, but also making sure that what they are reading is factual.