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The point is that Facebook ads, regardless of how precisely targeted they may (or may not) have been, did not sway the 2016 election, and I am not aware of any
by downandout 7y ago
The point is that Facebook ads, regardless of how precisely targeted they may (or may not) have been, did not sway the 2016 election, and I am not aware of any other election Facebook is even thought to have had any effect on. The whole “it’s Facebook’s fault” narrative was shaped by a liberal media desperate to explain why they were unsuccessful in influencing it themselves. Rather than accept the fact that they had simply a run a fatally flawed candidate, and had alienated large swaths of the country by calling them stupid for not agreeing with every one of their views, liberals found a scapegoat: it was Facebook’s fault.
Facebook is an echo chamber. People don’t go there to be informed; they go there to validate their already held beliefs. Given the large ideological chasm between the two candidates in the 2016 election, it defies logic that even a single voter was swayed or chose not to vote at all based on ads they saw on Facebook.
- dane-pgp 7y agoHaving lost the popular vote, but winning the presidency with a margin of 77,744 votes in specific locations, it is not hard to imagine that Trump's success could have been thanks to carefully targeted political ads. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-election-came-down-to-77-744-votes-in-pennsylvania-wisconsin-and-michigan-updated https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-elect... Of course it's impossible to say whether Trump would have won even if he hadn't spent any money on Facebook ads, but we're talking about a campaign that spent hundreds of millions of dollars in total. If this amount of money doesn't include enough to influence 78k people to go out and vote for a specific candidate, then we might as well give up on the very concept of advertising.