Can Facebook influence an election result?
In this cross-posting from The Conversation, Michael Brand discusses how Facebook could influence the outcome of the US Presidential election.
Facebook was in hot water this May over allegations of a liberal bias in its Trending topics feature.
This was not the first time Facebook had been accused of covertly meddling with politics.
In 2012, Facebook took heat for tweaking the news feed of 1.9 million users for increased political content. And in 2014, following a 689,000-person experiment in emotion manipulation, Clay Johnson, the co-founder of Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama’s online campaign for the presidency in 2008, asked:
