America’s new social distancing reality has changed the landscape of the 2020 election. Candidates are not out knocking on doors, and U.S. election officials are getting ready for a record surge in mail ballots. But regardless of these setbacks, candidates have found another way to influence citizens—social media.
Four years after the Russian interference efforts on the election, which reached more than 100 million users on Facebook alone, Americans’ social media usage has only increased—a likely result of quarantine. Now more than ever, people are online, and experts say that the internet has been flooded with bad information or misinformation.
In April, “NewsGuard” published a list of 36 websites that were peddling hoaxes related to coronavirus. Just a month later, the list had surpassed 200. A study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University in May found that nearly half the Twitter accounts tweeting messages about the coronavirus are likely bots—automated accounts designed to make it appear that more humans are acting a certain way than they truly are.
Social media usage had already been on the rise in the U.S. even before the pandemic gave Americans plenty of time to kill on their phones and computers. This was despite the fact that social media giants were getting backlash—”Facebook” in particular—in the wake of the 2016 election. Among the issues: “Facebook” CEO Mark Zuckerburg downplaying Russian interference efforts, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and research that seemed to point to people being happier when they weren’t so connected.
Ever since the pandemic resulted in quarantine, social media usage has skyrocketed. “We know that people rely on social apps in times of crises and in times when we can’t be together in person,” Zuckerburg said on April 29. “And right now, we are experiencing both of those all around the world at the same time.” For the first time ever, Zuckerberg announced, more than 3 billion people used “Facebook,” “Messenger,” “Instagram” or “WhatsApp” in a single month. Twitter announced in April as well that it saw a first-quarter 24% year-over-year increase in the number of daily users who saw ads.
This is dangerous because most people under the age of 30 rely on social media to get their news and a daily dose of politics, and when most, if not all, of this information is wrong, it leads to people not making an informed vote. Social media is virtually an unmediated way for politicians to talk to their followers, which means that they jump over the filtering role that the media play in terms of helping people to understand political races. So that continues to be a really important way that politicians can talk to their audiences or their followers in essentially an unfiltered sense without any challenge or pushback from the news media.
Social media is already just amplifying the views about this election that people have and is definitely going to play a big role in how this election will turn out, but there is no sure-fire way of knowing the damage that it will do.