Shaping Public Opinion Digitally: Astroturfing and Elections

The 2016 election was a watershed moment for the USA's political system. The nation's 45th president-elect—a maverick with scant regard for norms, established institutions and the separation of powers—lost the popular vote to opponent Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump's victory exposed a conceptual flaw in the Electoral College, but that was not without precedent. The stepping stones to his electoral success, however, are another matter. Other candidates have prevailed without a popular mandate, but this antipublian president (Graber et al. 2017) may be the first to have risen to the nation's highest office buoyed by fake news, social bots and political astroturfing. Social media's power to sway public opinion is no mystery, but the way in which political stakeholders packaged and delivered digital messages in this election was unprecedented. The paper would explore social media's ramifications for democracy and the role of inter-net communication channels in surging populism. I am particularly interested in investigating action groups, troll houses and bot armies' astroturfing strategies. Astroturfing merits research by political scientists. This deceptive practice appears to have shaped public opinion and changed the political climate in recent years. Facebook, a platform with tremendous reach, largely ignored astroturfing during the election. Reluctant to investigate claims of Russian meddling on behalf of Donald Trump's campaign, the internet giant finally bowed to the pressure brought on by a government investigation into politically charged advertising. An inquiry into the Russian government's interference in the 2016 presidential election revealed that some 3,000 ads placed on Facebook may have been tied to the ‘Kremlin initiative’ (Shane and Isaac 2017). Facebook reckons they reached around 146 million people. Troll-house workers are thought to have contributed to this operation with some 80,000 conventional comments. It is difficult to determine the extent of these strategies' influence over voters; the numbers suggest that even a minor shift in perception could have a major impact in a tight race. Take, for example, the state of Michigan, where Trump's margin over Clinton was a mere 10,704 votes (2,279,543 vs. 2,268,839; CNN 2016). If bots, bought ads and fake news nudged just a small percentage of the nearly 2.3 million votes for Trump in his direction, then astroturfing may have tipped the scales. Mark Zuckerberg denies that Facebook decided the outcome. Trump's social media manager Brad Parscale disagrees; he says the social media platform won Trump the presidency. Twitter accounts may have helped; investigators believe that some 600 were part of this effort to shape public opinion (Wakabayashi and Shane 2017). Either way, this example suggests that astroturfing campaigns cannot be ignored—particularly in an increasingly polarized society where margins are so narrow.