Filter Bubbles

The 2016 election has been the first election where social media has been a key player to how people got their information. Statistics say “44 percent of American adults said they had learned something new in the past week about the election from social media.” However, with social media such an important influence on the younger generation it is important for all of this information to be legitimate and truthful. Google and Facebook have recently changed their policies to try to stop fake news articles from popping up within their ad space. The spread of fake news articles skews the public's perception of the candidates. The guardian talks about how the American voter is not just one demographic (college educated individuals, white men, minorities etc. ) because of this lack of (straightforward), it's hard to get an accurate prediction on who would have won the election. Additionally, the media affected the election negatively because they did not give the general public enough information to understand the statistics that they were

More and more people are getting their news from social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Tumbler and many more, and candidates are using this to their advantage. This election is probably one of the first were candidates have actually used social media sites as their direct communication line to potential voters. Social media today had gone from gossip and family pictures to a location for political strategy. Thanks largely to trumps regular social media first declarations and its actually working particularly with the younger voters. A study released last year from the Pew Research Center that Marissa Lang cited showed that “Among 18- to 29-year-olds, nearly two-thirds said social media is the most helpful means of learning new things about politics.” (Lang, 2016). Even if the candidate isn’t the one posting the video or message in the end it will still end up on social media. For example, Trump had announced his plan to ban all Muslims from entering the united states in South Carolina not on social media however it found its way there and spread like wild fire. This sent those who were outraged to respond in disgust and those who encouraged it to share it so that their friends could see and so on and so on. Even if those who shared it did it to

A common mistake that occurs during past research is the assumption that partisan media effects are static. This however, is not the case. The article points towards an evolving and dynamic media effects during election cycles. To

Social media has given the human race an unprecedented amount of access to news and information. However, the validity and vetting of this information is often questionable at best. The emergence of websites such as Breitbart, Occupy Democrats, and TheBlaze have given way to a constant stream of partisan

As the US election approaches, more and more people are paying attention to politics and social issues. Some Americans are using Facebook or Instagram to appeal to people to support one of the political parties or candidates. Not only Americans, but also people all around the

Sunstein argues that an echo-chamber effect results when people receive news from various media outlets. Sunstein asserts that, when a person gets their news from a medium which embraces similar ideological viewpoints, this person’s beliefs not only harden, but become situated on more extreme ends of the political spectrum. Three-stage academic studies conducted over the past three decades have found that balanced presentations of news, which carefully examine both sides to an argument, are more likely to increase polarization, rather than to reduce it. This is due to “biased assimilation”, where a person credits the information which supports their original view and dismisses information which opposes it. This also explains why it is difficult to force out false rumors and factual errors, since corrections can be self-defeating, leading people to having a firmer commitment to their erroneous beliefs. However, Sunstein argues, surprising validators can be used to allow people to reconsider information from a source they find credible. Sunstein concludes with arguing that what matters most is not what is being said, but who is saying

A news programs bias and political party standings can effect what types of propaganda they show of certain candidates. For example, FOX news is a strictly Republican news channel, it supports Republican candidate, meanwhile news channels such as MSNBC and PBS are extremely democratic programs and support Democratic candidates in elections. News programs political bias can affect the way that particular program portrays a candidate for an upcoming election and a candidate’s portrayal can change a voter’s opinion of a candidate and can cause that candidate to lose viewers’ votes. The broadcasting of malicious rumors and gossip in any form by news programs gives a negative conception to a viewer. No viewer wants to vote for a candidate that is portrayed in a way that makes the viewer believe that they are bad for the country. Every viewer needs to take in to consideration the political bias of a news program before changing his or her opinion of a candidate as well as do some research on the candidates of an election themselves.

In the United States, much of the media is controlled by Political Parties or commercial corporations. Presidential elections have become a war between media outlets that state either facts or fiction about opposing candidates. This propaganda spreads out to social media such as Facebook and Twitter (Hamilton and Kosar). Because of the bombardment of political propaganda, the producers of this information or misinformation direct public opinion. Government agencies also use networks and social media to sway public opinion as detailed in the Washington Post.

You wrote, “I think we can learn a lot from this video and have a careful mindset that now our online search engine is filtering what we are interested in and what side we take on certain topics” and that could not be any truer. Such as, as when I am doing my due diligence on the choice I have to make in less than two weeks regarding who our next president may be, the results of my searches compared to my husbands are entirely different. Social media campaigning is the new frontier for electoral politics, bringing with it an incredible amount of contact and psychological effects. One has to believe that algorithmically created “Filter Bubbles” may change the necessary strategy to win presidential elections in the future!

Political scientist, journalists, and politicians alike often discuss the role of the news media’s place in affecting campaigns, and voter perceptions. Claims of media bias in political news coverage have risen over the past two decades. Scholarly research has explored concerns that broadcast and print media shape voting decisions in democratic processes.

During the recent 2016 presidential election, candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton could be seen glorified on the television screens of an MSNBC segment. On the other hand, viewing Fox News reveals a very noticeable conservative bias, favoring ideology from candidates like Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and John Kasich. CNN, thought to be the most neutral of the three, is only considered unbiased because it always has “at least one conservative and one liberal pundits” reporting on an issue (Garcia). News media rarely provides information unbiasedly, there seems to be some sort of political leaning to almost every news report. Although biased news allows for more perspectives and grants more information to the audience, the extent to which

Misleading information given to the public can indeed affect major events, such as elections. If people are given incorrect information, then there is no way for them to make the correct choice. Fake news has become a real issue, influencing elections, causing people to seem more ignorant, and causing arguments or attacks even by the president himself. Misleading information given to the public can indeed affect major events, such as elections.

If you think about it, if enough people watch the same news channel or different news channels with the same stories, the news can control how people think and act. Biased articles can turn people against someone/something or make them think something they wouldn’t have on their own. Articles showing only one side can give some wrong information and turn against something they maybe shouldn’t be so quick to turn on. And in many cases, this makes the people throw away the chance of the truth or right coming out. For example, an article by Les Picker on the website for the National Bureau of Economic Research states this- “They find that the introduction of Fox News had a small but statistically significant effect on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained an estimate of between 0.4 and 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. They also find that Fox News had a significant effect on Senate Vote share and on voter turnout. Their estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican according to a first audience measure, and 11 to 28 percent according to a second, more restrictive audience measure.”. This shows how the news can sometimes change how people think completely. These numbers may seem small as percentages, but they are quite large in real numbers. This is one of many examples of why the news

Media has provided no reliable information about politics to citizens. Sometimes media distort information to get people’s attention or even to get more buyers, but the problems are that it affects the relationship between politics and citizens. For example, one of the reasons for lower turnout comes from negative advertisement presented by media. During the 60’s to up now people stop caring about voting, it happens because conventional wisdom says that “negative ads wins voters .” Another example is if candidate A says that marijuana should be allowed in any state of U.S, the media can distort the information by saying candidate A is a drug dealer. However, what media does do not affect themselves instead help them to gets politics and people’s attention. Moreover, media makes politicians fight against each other by

Social media has grown at phenomenal rates over the past decade, with its rise being easily visible in several fields such as publishing, business, and activism, among others. The rise of its use in the field of politics is well known by those who are on and off social media, as a result of increasing number of politicians using this global platform to their maximum advantage.