Divided We Stand; Social Media’s Role in a Stolen Election

Pamphlets, bulletin boards and broadsides are nothing new in the scrum of American politics; we have warred internally, with foreign powers and have struggled for centuries to find the balance of what makes us.  Do we stand or do we kneel, do we love it or leave it, do we protest or prostrate – all questions that have been stoked by an amateur band of “media” practitioners operating sans the benefit of editorial or peer review.  As facts emerge about last year’s Presidential election, evidence is slowly emerging that foreign powers would line Mark Zuckerberg’s pocket to frenzy the Soylent Green and sway an election.

Social media are like no other media source, they can reach millions in an instant and activate people to move for good or bad.   The speed and reach social media have is greater than traditional media because it lacks an editorial board – people can say pretty much anything they want as long as it abides by broad user agreements and “codes of conduct”.   Social media companies do their best to police content, but tech savvy users have perfected the art of crafting stories that elude policy violations, while stoking a targeted base.  If users want to boost a post or story, paid advertising can be purchased that hand delivers this information to social media consumers with porous oversight of content veracity.

Facebook now finds itself front-and-center in an ongoing Department of Justice investigating collusion between the 2016 Trump Presidential campaign and Russian operatives. Millions of dollars of advertisements, purchased by known pro-Russian affiliates, pandered to Trump’s base by disseminating false, misleading and malicious misinformation that ultimately lead to an election that is being investigated.  Although monitoring free-speech is a slippery slope, Courts have ruled that there are some limits and it may very well be time for social media providers to look closer for criminal activity tied to their paid advertisers and posts.

Social media in its simple megaphone for freedom of expression is an amazing structure, but with all powerful structures must come responsibility, ramifications and rules.  The more pervasive social media becomes, so does its destructive and divisive power.  Regardless of the outcome of ongoing Federal investigations, the role that Facebook and Twitter played in allowing a foreign power to tilt an election is alarming and a cautionary tale of the power or an unfettered, loosely checked technologies we are just beginning to understand.