(Bloomberg) — Using Facebook before the 2020 U.S. presidential election may have increased someone’s chances of voting for Donald Trump, university researchers said in a study published Monday in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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As part of the study, researchers asked nearly 19,900 Facebook users and 15,600 Instagram users to stop using the platforms ahead of the 2020 election. The authors, led by Stanford University professors Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, found some evidence which suggest that people who used Facebook might have been more likely to vote for Trump. They noted that their finding fell “just short” of being statistically significant.
“Therefore, we need to approach this with caution,” Gentzkow said in a statement. “But if it is real, it is big enough that it could impact the outcome of a close election.”
The report represents the largest-scale evidence to date on the role of access to Facebook and Instagram in shaping political opinions and knowledge ahead of a presidential election. It is part of a broader research effort that aims to study the impact of social media on democracy. Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. agreed to give researchers at Stanford University, New York University and other academic institutions access to the platform’s data and algorithms to conduct the work.
The researchers were careful to point out in the latest study that the findings were specific to the users studied, but they noted that the results are consistent with the general view that the Trump campaign used Facebook more effectively than the Biden campaign. The report comes as Biden and Trump face off once again in the November elections. Social media companies including Meta, X and TikTok are exerting increasing pressure to moderate content on their platforms ahead of the vote.
The study published in PNAS found that Facebook and Instagram use had little to no effect on a person’s political leanings, their views on whether the election was legitimate, their views on opposing parties or whether they voted. But Facebook use may have made people more likely to vote for Donald Trump, researchers said. Instagram shutdowns did not result in the same favorability toward Trump, the report shows.
The researchers cautioned in the study that their conclusions about vote choice cannot be “extrapolated to the general population without strong assumptions.”
The results served to confirm previous studies published last year that, among other things, found that changing the classification and types of stories users saw in their news feeds and limiting the sharing of posts did not change political attitudes. Despite this, Facebook has long been criticized for its apparent influence on elections. The social media site was criticized during the 2016 election for selling ads to Russian actors trying to sow discord among U.S. voters and during the January 6, 2021, insurrection, which was organized in part on the platform.
Trump used Facebook extensively during his last two presidential campaigns, amassing more than 34 million followers on his official Facebook page before being banned from the site in 2021. After losing the 2020 US presidential election, Trump began posting false posts allegations about voter fraud on Facebook. , which the company determined encouraged the January 6 insurrection.
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