Did False News on Facebook Influence the Election?

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false news on Facebook

By now, most people know not to believe everything they read on the internet… or do they? It’s no question that social media played a huge role in the recent presidential election. In fact, it played such a big role that even false news on Facebook might have influenced voter’s decisions on election day.

Facebook has admitted in the past that it has a problem with false news spreading. Rather than just ignoring the problem, they offered a solution to it. As of last year, users can now flag false news on Facebook. If enough users flag the story as fake, it will appear less on the News Feed, and even warn future readers of the false content. While this is a helpful feature, some falsee news on Facebook still slips through the cracks.

Prior to the election, an alleged excerpt from a 1998 People magazine interview of Donald Trump went viral on Facebook. The excerpt quoted him saying, “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They are the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.” The problem with this quote isn’t the content — the problem is that Donald Trump never actually said this.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerfalse news on Facebookberg keeps denying that false news on Facebook influenced the election, but reports are saying otherwise. While the fake Donald Trump interview did not cost him the election, it was just one example of the false stories on Facebook. According to Zuckerberg, the fake stories, which are created mainly by conspiracy theorist and extreme activists, are only a small percentage of News Feed content. That being said, it is hard to gauge the extent to which these false stories influence people. Facebook encourages its users to keep reporting false stories when they see them in order to prevent them from going viral.

Maddie Belt
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