Should I Stay or Should I Go: How Facebook Impacts Political Views

 Silver Barker 

sb230419@ohio.edu

Illustration from The Press-Enterprise

For years and years on, the media has increasingly been known to play a massive role in how people retain their daily news. These media platforms allow their users to act as consumers and give them a space where they can interact with what they read and share their opinions with the public. Facebook, the mother of these platforms, has reached a wide-scale audience of users, including different ages, ethnicities, and even partisans. While fake news has been a term presented way before Donald Trump's presidency, it did not take over social media until the rise of the Trump Era. In recent years, Facebook has highly impacted how this nation views political candidates and news outlets. It seems to have become more common for people to use the media to determine whether a candidate is worthy of their vote. 

This practice has caused a problem for these candidates, and the watchdogs who are expected to report carefully and provide accurate content on these platforms, or else their words could be misunderstood. The drastic measures that the public will take to spread information via media that could discredit and harm a person's career/lifestyle proves just how controversial politically motivated statements on media are. People rely so profoundly on the media that they tend to gravitate to the campaigns/ads/ and statements that favor their political views. This practice would be okay if all the content were from objective news outlets with primary sources; however, the problem is that it is not, meaning not everything they see is true. As Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg states, the company has shown a "broader impact... from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote." While that may sound like an ideal opportunity because people can finally voice their concerns and share with the community, it also creates trouble because anyone can get on the platform and say anything. 

There are many real-life scenarios of this issue being played out. More currently, several well-known political figures, including Kamala Harris, have been victims of this online spread of false information harming their reputations. In August, Steve Baldwin had posted a statement on Facebook mentioning how he remembered Kamala Harries for having her career launched after sleeping with Willie Brown. While Harris did date Brown long before her election; however, this did not matter, and it was too late. What Baldwin had just thought was a simple post had turned into a harmful accusation of Harris and many women in politics sleeping their way up the ladder. There were sexually-related cartoons and rumors of Harris being sent across the media. Most of the people sharing it were conservative commentators who did not favor Harris being in office. Baldwin, later on, admits that he regrets what he had said because he witnessed his words become twisted in a way to work against and discredit Harris. He also highlights an opinion that needs to be emphasized more on social media in which he needs "to be more careful... and does make me more skeptical of other posts that I see." Social media, especially Facebook, are not trusted platforms because they do not fact-check political ads. 

All of this talk about social media users being able to interact with their community and candidates raises the question of how we, as a freedom of speech country, continue this transparency but in a way that avoids toxicity. Some news organizations have already taken a step toward accomplishing this task. For example, the Santa Local Cruz newsletter has shifted its focus toward the people's responses by asking the community what they would like to see more of in their candidates to receive their vote and publish these responses upon release of their weekly publications.