Or maybe, alternate world view, it does not even matter as much as you think it does.
We keep having these discussions about the impact of social media as if the relationship was directly causal, ie Zuck pushes a button and robot people do his bidding. Wish the problem were so easy. It's at scale, dealing with fractions of percentages over thousands of randomly subsegmented markets, nobody knows what the hell is going on. It's incomprehensible by any human.
What we know is that people pay billions of dollars to advertise there. We know that most of the world's population (!) has signed up. We know that people who quit feel better. We can observe people doing and saying things with other people at a scale never seen before. In fact, that's one of the selling points. We know that more and more studies are showing addictive and maladaptive behavior from people who spend a lot of time there.
We're not trying to convict FB in a court of law or inventing some new science. The preponderance of all the available evidence says that there's a major social change at work worldwide that has at least some deleterious effects. Works for me. Any small number times a billion is a big number. That's the entire business model of social media. You logically can't deny the way social media works in order to make a defense of social media.
How do you go about connecting ads viewed to votes, or even poling data? Of those views how many users engaged with the content?
From my perspective, it has all of the hallmarks of a moral panic, right down to the calls to "think of the children."
Do you have a citation for this? It seems like a failure in the free market if organizations spend $55 billion [1] on Facebook advertisements with no benefit.
==From my perspective, it has all of the hallmarks of a moral panic, right down to the calls to "think of the children."==
What data is that perspective based on or is it just your gut feeling (aka bias)?
[1] https://martechtoday.com/despite-ongoing-criticism-facebook-...
Look, I'm not say that FB ads are totally useless in general, just that there's some burden of proof when you claim they swayed an election.
> What data is that perspective based on or is it just your gut feeling (aka bias)?
People have literally used the phrase "think of the children," or some variation.
Second, campaigns are not driven like companies.
You should also consider that you are not viewing reality correctly.