Blog 4

The article posted about the election by CBC brought up some very valid points.

Their analysis of the topic was tremendously thorough and provided knowledge and honestly just got you thinking about how the election was swayed and how it was not. What are your thoughts? Was the election swayed or was it not? The article helps point out some fine points and data to both of these arguments. The one that I found most interesting is that 59% of the links shared on the internet have never been read. This to me is very interesting because a bunch of people claim that Facebook and other online news outlets greatly swayed the election. Using this data that CBC collected, there was a large amount of people who did not care about what these article had to say. That being said, they also mentioned that the only ones who remained listening were the ones who agreed to the point being presented since it is WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR.

     Be honest, how often is your opinion changed by reading an article on Facebook? For me, not very often. Within the article they talk about a Pew Reasearch Study and it says "79 per cent of social media users said they have never changed their views on a social or political issue because of something they saw on social media.". Considering this, it further supports that the election was barely tilted due to social media.

"We've developed a soapbox culture," Stated by Elamin Abdelmahmoud (editor of news curation for Buzz Feed News). Basically this means that we are associated with the same people who most likely think like us, act like us and in this case, vote like us. As a community they say that Facebook and Twitter support this style and I totally agree. The one thing that makes me agree the most to this is the "recommended" feed where they use related topics and bring them to you. Most of the time you're getting the same information or opinion and the points are constantly repeated over and over. For example, Hillary's email is a large topic and they keep bringing this up because it is constantly recommended. 

Being a kid, this election has brought many different points but because we're kids, we are constantly making and creating jokes about the topics. How many pictures or memes have you seen relating to the election? Probably a whole lot.

A couple days ago, I read an article posted by BuzzFeed, it was called "This Analysis Shows How Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook". The point of this was to show that fake news stories were getting more clicks than real news stories thus potentially swaying the election results. This provided important points that I personally don't believe.

Reasons why I don't agree with it

- Not everyone believes these fake news articles with farfetched titles
- Not just Americans read these fake news articles, other parts of the world WHO CANNOT VOTE read some of these articles and have no power to change the results
-You can click a link multiple times to provide more views
-Is BuzzFeed a reliable source?

Ways we can think for ourselves

- Don't judge a book by its cover, don't just read the title and pretend you know.
- Read multiple articles on the topic
- Read trusted news outlets
- If possible do research to develop your opinions
- Don't believe everything you hear


Anyways, I strongly support the statements that this article was trying to make and I'm a firm believer that this election was hardly swayed due to the "fake news" on social media.