“While it was likely never the company’s intent to create a system that encouraged people to hear only what they wanted — whether or not it was true — Facebook didn’t get here by accident.”
A lot has been written about Facebook’s influence on the 2016 election, but this Buzzfeed article may be the best analysis of how and why that happened that I’ve seen.
The article traces the roots of Facebook’s influence back to the night of the 2012 election and Barack Obama’s celebratory tweet that went viral.
It was that social media moment that prompted a competitive reaction from Facebook and fueled their efforts to build what turned out to be a “petri dish for confirmation bias.”