[politics]What Facebook Did to American Democracy … Alexis Madrigal on Facebook’s impact on the 2016 US election.

A few days before the election Silverman and fellow BuzzFeed contributor Lawrence Alexander traced 100 pro–Donald Trump sites to a town of 45,000 in Macedonia. Some teens there realized they could make money off the election, and just like that, became a node in the information network that helped Trump beat Clinton.

Whatever weird thing you imagine might happen, something weirder probably did happen. Reporters tried to keep up, but it was too strange. As Max Read put it in New York Magazine, Facebook is “like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize.” No one can quite wrap their heads around what this thing has become, or all the things this thing has become.

“Not even President-Pope-Viceroy Zuckerberg himself seemed prepared for the role Facebook has played in global politics this past year,” Read wrote.

And we haven’t even gotten to the Russians.

Facebook’s Impact on the 2016 US Election

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2017 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Facebook, Politics, Social Media.

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