Could Facebook Change Election Results?

Employees at Facebook asked Mark Zuckerberg if Facebook can stop Donald Trump from becoming the next president of the United States?

Facebook is the biggest social media platform worldwide and has an important role in spreading information and news. Though Facebook gets a say in how that news gets there. This matters as now employees of Facebook are asking their CEO if there’s any way they can use the company to stop a presidential candidate from winning the election (Donald Trump).

Every week there is an internal vote for Facebook employees for what questions should be passed on to their CEO (Mark Zuckerberg). A question from the March 4 poll was:  

“What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?”

Facebook has over a billion users, and around 64 percent of American adults use it, and 30 percent of those get news on a daily basis via Facebook. That’s a population of roughly 73 million American adults. To say that Facebook dominates the media landscape is to get the perspective wrong: Facebook is the media landscape.

Here is Facebook’s response:

“Voting is a core value of democracy and we believe that supporting civic participation is an important contribution we can make to the community. We encourage any and all candidates, groups, and voters to use our platform to share their views on the election and debate the issues. We as a company are neutral – we have not and will not use our products in a way that attempts to influence how people vote.”

Still, Facebook has been caught on numerous occasions before with its massive user based experiments. Though, in an election, would Facebook bring that same ability against a particular candidate? The company says “no” at this moment in time, but it’s one of the many questions that won’t be settled by this election.