Is the Social Network also the Electoral Network? Yes, says Max Read, who suggested in a piece for New York magazine that Mark Zuckerberg had more to do with Donald Trump’s win than did James Comey, Julian Assange, or Bernie Sanders. “It can be clarifying,” Read wrote, “to identify the conditions that allowed access to the highest levels” of politics to Trump, “a dangerous and unpredictable bigot…In this case, the condition was: Facebook.”
To Read, “the most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news…Of course, lies and exaggerations have always been central to real political campaigns; Facebook has simply made them easier to spread, and discovered that it suffers no particular market punishment for doing so -- humans seem to have a strong bias toward news that confirms their beliefs, and environments where those beliefs are unlikely to be challenged.”
Moreover, Read noted, Facebook helped Trump by further diminishing the gatekeeping powers of the already weakened mainstream media (bolding added):
For most of the 20th century, the flow of information was controlled by a relatively small number of media companies [which were] large and generally corporate, Establishment-friendly and politically centrist: They limited, mostly, the acceptable range of political opinion, because that nice middle was where advertising and subscription business models were most profitable…
Facebook assaults both components of this power dynamic, providing the platform and audience that only news-media outlets could once command, and the organizing power that only parties once held…[Trump] could express a political position -- essentially, white welfare-state ethno-nationalism -- that the [Republican] party would once have choked off for threatening its delicate coalition…
…Facebook [also] allowed Trump to directly combat the hugely negative media coverage directed at him, simply by giving his campaign and its supporters another host of channels to distribute counterprogramming. This, precisely, is why more good journalism would have been unlikely to change anyone’s mind. The Post and the Times no longer have a monopoly on information about a candidate. Endless reports of corruption, venality, misogyny, and incompetence merely settle in a Facebook feed next to a hundred other articles from pro-Trump sources (if they settle into a Trump supporter’s feed at all).
From March 2014 until July 2015, Read was editor-in-chief of the now-defunct gossip-heavy web site Gawker, a casualty of the litigation over the Hulk Hogan sex tape.
