Elections and Media

In Dec 2016, shortly after the US presidential election, Facebook and five US news and fact-checking organizations—ABC News, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes—entered a partnership to combat misinformation. Variously seen as a public relations stunt, a new type of collaboration, or an unavoidable coupling of organizations through circumstances beyond either’s exclusive control, the partnership emerged as a key example of platform-publisher collaboration.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has boasted often that it made better use of Facebook’s advertising tools than Hillary Clinton’s campaign did. An internal Facebook white paper, published days after the election, shows the company’s data scientists agree. "Trump’s FB campaigns were more complex than Clinton’s and better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes," the author of the internal paper wrote, citing revenue of $44 million for Trump and $28 million for Clinton in that period.

Researchers at Ohio State University find that fake news probably played a significant role in depressing Hillary Clinton's support on Election Day.

After examining Russia’s 2014 disinformation campaign in Ukraine, we found that Russian propaganda has very uneven effects. Whether it sways individuals to vote for pro-Russian candidates — or backfires, and makes them less likely to do so — depends on the political predispositions of the target audience.

Nothing helps President Donald Trump more — or tightens his hold on his base more securely — than his cozy, mutually-beneficial relationship with conservative TV. Trump's feedback loop, including cable-news coverage, and mainstream-media squawking, convinces the president that he's winning his war on media.

Sinclair Broadcast Group is defending itself against criticism for a recent on-air promotional message many of its local news anchors were asked to read that warned viewers about "false news" on competing media outlets.  Sinclair produced the spots to express concern about the spread of such false media reports such as the "Pope Endorses Trump" fake news story that quickly spread across social media, said Scott Livingston, Sinclair's senior vice president of news. “Some other false stories, like the fake ‘Pizzagate’ story, can result in dangerous consequences,” he said.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Democracy 21 filed a criminal complaint alleging that the Trump campaign and a super PAC controlled by President Trump's new national security adviser John Bolton worked with the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to violate a law preventing foreign nations from participating in US elections. The groups allege that the John Bolton Super PAC, the Trump campaign and its former chairman Stephen Bannon were aware of Cambridge Analytica's nefarious activities.

Facebook has a four-part plan to protect its platform from malicious attacks during the 2018 US midterm elections:

Cambridge Analytica and SCL were the subject of a number of previously unpublished harassment complaints filed in response to the numerous political survey and messaging calls made on behalf of US campaigns between 2013 and 2017.