Inaccuracies, melodrama, bias and outrage is what governed the process of election news reporting. Their headlines were tilted and reports from the ground were skewed in favour of a particular candidate as the papers manipulated the information. The collective will of the nation’s media failed to stop from becoming President.

Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State under President Barack Obama, a US Senator for New York from 2001 to 2009, and First Lady during her husband's presidency in the 1990s was seen as the “establishment” politician, while Trump was a neophyte, an authoritarian narcissist who, among many other things said he wanted to bring back torture, kill the innocent families of terrorists, and ban Muslims from entering the country. As Trump himself put it, “I have got nothing but bad publicity from the dishonest and disgusting media” (Sarma, Inquirers Journal). The press covered Hillary Clinton like the next President of the United States. It portrayed Donald Trump like a billionaire reality-television star, who turned politics into performance art and sparked a powerful backlash in the process.

While Clinton garnered the support of a long list of editorial boards during the finals, her Republican rival did not receive any. Trump did receive the endorsement of four major newspapers in the Republican primaries, whereas Clinton received over 80 newspaper endorsements during the Democratic primaries, and many editorial boards have since reiterated their conviction that she should be the next President, not Trump (Harrington, Business Insider). An anti-Trump attitude permeated elite journalistic circles right from the time he clinched the Indiana primary. The New York Daily News reported this with the following headline: “Republican Party 1854-2016; Dearly beloved, we’re gathered here today to mourn the Grand Old Party. A once great political party killed by epidemic of Trump.” (Noyes, Fox News)

Most of the major papers just heaped praises on Clinton in the articles endorsing her. The New York Times argued that their endorsement was “rooted in respect for her intellect, experience, toughness and courage over a career of almost continuous public service,” (“Hillary”, New York Times) whereas The Los Angeles Times emphasized her “pragmatism — her ability to build consensus and solve problems” (“Hillary”, Los Angeles Times) and her flexibility to cut across party lines and work with political opponents. According to the Houston Chronicle, she is the “steady hand” (“These are”, Houston Chronicle) that the unsettling times require. The Washington Post had an editorial where they referred to Trump as a “national problem” (“Hillary”, Washington Post). Most of the newspaper editorials that mentioned Trump, did it along similar lines.

In an editorial on November 6, the right-leaning Wall Street Journal made clear that it was not endorsing the Republican or Democratic nominees for President. The editorial, titled “the Gamble of Trump,” notes that the upside of a Trump presidency is “political disruption” that comes with “manifest personal flaws” (“Gamble”, Wall Street Journal). A vote for Hillary Clinton, by contrast, comes with “four more years of brute progressive government,” (“Gamble”, Wall Street Journal). USA Today declared Trump as “unfit for presidency” (“Trump”, USA Today) while The San Francisco Chronicle referred to him as “a demagogue with authoritarian instincts who is treating a run for the presidency as if it were a reality TV show where outlandishness is the coin of the realm” (“Chronicle”, San Francisco Chronicle).

Other papers such as The Dallas Morning News, The Cincinati Enquirer and The Arizona Republic broke the tradition of endorsing right wing candidates and endorsed Hillary, giving special emphasis to the fact that this was the first time (or one of the very few times) that they were endorsing a Democratic nominee. The BBC explains a concept called “crossover endorsement” in view of the current election where a politically conservative newspaper refused to endorse Trump, reasoning that he is not a “typical Republican candidate” (Sripathi, First Post). Each of them made really powerful statements justifying their stance. The Enquirer, which has only supported Republicans for President for almost a century, had this to say: “This is not a traditional race, and these are not traditional times. ... We need a leader who will bring out the best in all Americans, not the worst” (“Enquirer”, Enquirer). The editorial also stated: “our reservations about Clinton pale in comparison to our fears about Trump” (“Enquirer”, Enquirer). For the Arizona Republic, the reason for switching sides was that Trump was not a proper conservative: “The 2016 Republican candidate is not conservative and he is not qualified. That's why, for the first time in our history, The Arizona Republic will support a Democrat for President” (“Endorsement”, Arizona Republic). For the San Diego Union Tribune, which endorsed a democrat for the first time since its founding in 1868, the cross-over endorsement was due to the appraisal that “She’s [Hillary] the safe choice for the U.S. and for the world, for Democrats and Republicans alike” (“Why Hillary”, San Diego Tribune).

The above reports are enough to understand that the press was no fan of Trump. The media demonized Trump from start to finish, depicting him as an abnormal and potentially dangerous candidate who could not be even-handed. Virtually every news article reflected a clear bias against Trump in favour of Clinton. The stories, photos, headlines and placement of articles in the paper were structured in such a way that it made Hillary seem like the obvious choice. In statements unprecedented for a candidate for the nation’s highest office, Trump expressed distrust in the media, even going so far as to tell a crowd at an October rally that the media was “stealing” the election from him (Johnson, Deseret news).

The television channels, on the other hand, seemed to have a different kind of coverage tactic. Analysis of news coverage from the 2016 primary races shows that mainstream media outlets’ bias led to over-coverage of the Donald Trump campaign and under-coverage of Democratic candidates, in particular Sen. Bernie Sanders. Even before the primaries began, Trump dominated media coverage. For the bulk of the campaign, Trump received more press attention than any other candidate. It gained even greater momentum after he started winning the primaries with a good lead, a narrative that continued till the culmination of the election (“Study”, Childress). The televised Republican debates helped tip the nomination in favour of Trump, placing him front and centre. He was already a TV celebrity, and with the exceptio of Jeb Bush, he was the only one of the Republicans running for President who had much in the way of name recognition. But that does not justify making Trump the primary focus of the coverage. For months, too, television executives were happy to give Trump unlimited access. CNN, MSNBC and Fox cut into whatever programme they were airing to capture Trump in action.

But the nature and tone of coverage is another story. The media vilified trump from the start. The networks spent far more time airing the details of Trump’s controversies than trying to hold Hillary Clinton accountable for her scandals. Trump was slammed as embodying the politics of fear, a dangerous and vulgar misogynistic bully who had insulted vast swaths of the American electorate. Reporters also bluntly called out Trump for lying in his public remarks in a way they never did with Clinton, despite her rather scandalous record of false statements. Some also saw the media’s extensive coverage of unproven sexual assault allegations against Trump as an attempt to depress turnout among his supporters (Kennedy, US News). The newspapers support was more for the liberal ideals than for Hillary. The liberal idea has become the politically correct stance in recent times and the newspapers’ support of Clinton should be read in this light. Take for instance terms like ‘post-truth’ which gained popularity in connection with Trump campaign. Though the term implies a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, there is also the connotation that there is a “truth” out there; the truth of the liberals. The nature of the coverage is a reflection of the media taking the liberal ideal for granted.

On MSNBC, host Lawrence O’Donnell derided Trump as an “imbecile candidate” (qtd. In Noyes, Fox News) while NPR’s Bob Garfield slammed him for “racism, xenophobia, misogyny, incitement, breathtaking ignorance on issues, both foreign and domestic, and a nuclear recklessness, reminiscent of a raving meth head with a machete on an episode of Cops” (qtd. In Noyes, Fox News). Nancy Giles, on MSNBC in June 2016, speculated that Trump was “clinically insane” (qtd. In Noyes, Fox News). MSNBC Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski floated the same smear in late August: “It’s time to hear from somebody in the mental health community...There’s not anybody at this table who doesn’t think he has some sort of problem” (qtd. In Noyes, Fox News). ABC permitted left-wing author and MSNBC analyst Michael Eric Dyson to appear on the programme “This Week” to claim that Trump’s “nationalism is really a white racist supremacist nationalism that wreaks terror on the American democratic experiment” (qtd. In Noyes, Fox News). Non-Hispanic whites make up 63 percent of the U.S; Hispanics, 17 percent; blacks, 12.3 percent; Asians, 5 percent; and multiracial Americans, 2.4 percent. In a country where more than 37 percent of the total population are non-whites, such an attitude towards nationalism can be destructive (Kayne, US NEWS). CNN’s Carl Bernstein agreed that Trump’s coalition “includes an awful lot of bigots and nativists and a lot of hateful people” (qtd. In Noyes, Fox News). Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation”, former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham sneered: “To paraphrase Henry Adams, the movement from George H. W. Bush to Donald Trump disproves Darwin.”(qtd. in “Hillary”, New York Times). Despite all this effort on the part of the traditional media, Trump won the elections. To understand how this happened, we need to look at the dynamics of political communication on new media and the kind of impact that it has on people. A stronger presence in the new media is the main reason why Trump could counter his overwhelmingly inferior standing among the traditional news media.

The use of Internet in election campaigns is not something that is new to the United States. It has a history of two decades. The Internet first surfaced as a tool for Presidential campaigning in the 2000 US Presidential race where both the Presidential hopefuls Al Gore and George W. Bush created simple websites. The Presidential primaries of 2000 demonstrated the potential of using the Internet as a fund-raising tool (Chadwick 18). New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, was the first candidate to raise one million dollars online. Even more impressive was the Internet fund-raising of John McCain, who was vying for the Republican Party nomination. At the time of the New Hampshire primary, McCain was virtually out of money. His surprise win, however, coupled with the publicity generated from it and an online appeal for donations helped him raise more than one-half million dollars through online donations on a single day (Chadwick 18).The first time that the Internet was given a significant role in electoral politics was in 2004 with the Howard Dean Campaign. Internet campaigns entered yet another phase in the 2006 congressional election cycle, altering the way candidates conduct campaigns. Congressional candidates were using the Internet for various purposes including fundraising, blogging, creating online communities that were loyal to their cause, making video and audio clips available, and much more. In January of 2007, Hillary Clinton announced her run for presidency on her website by way of a short video entitled “Let the Conversation Begin.” This trend, which started in 2006, continued through the 2008 Presidential campaign, reaching its maturation phase. By this time, virtually all serious candidates for national political office had fairly sophisticated websites that were maintained by professionals. “In 2008, 7 out of 16 candidates actually announced their candidacy on Youtube” (qtd. In Chadwick 67).

The 2008 campaign denoted a major shift in Presidential campaign because of the new media tools hosted under the dynamic Web 2.0 which did not confine itself to mere web pages but rather included blogging, social networking, and media sharing. Barack Obama is called the social media President for various reasons. A month after announcing his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama connected his campaign website with his personal Facebook profile to link posts on both pages and to expand his online presence. John McCain, his opponent, routinely released his television ads on Youtube and his personal campaign website. All the major Presidential hopefuls used the new media as a ancillary platform to disseminate their campaign messages and expand their reach (Katz 17-36).

With the Presidential election of 2008, almost all the candidates had established Facebook pages to interact with millions of Facebook members in an attempt to widen their reach and to attract new voters from the previously politically unengaged groups. Politicians created official profiles that were similar to the other profiles on Facebook, where they provided personal and political information, posted photograph and videos and interacted with their supporters. In addition to the official profile page, various other pages and groups dedicated to political issues were formed. Due to the increasing use of Facebook in campaigning, Facebook brought about some changes for the 2008 Presidential elections. Instead of creating profiles for the candidate, Facebook allowed each candidate to create a page. Even though the pages were similar to the profiles, the pages allowed candidates to improve their campaigns by posting various kinds of campaign materials which included public announcements, links to other pages, and YouTube, photo albums and event information. During the 2008 campaigns, this application was also made open to the rest of the world, which made it possible for elected officials and candidates in any country to be eligible for pages as long as a representative of the politician created the page (Williams 3).

Al Gore, the former Vice President, and 2000 Democratic Party Presidential standard bearer, declaimed that Obama’s election win “could not have happened without the Internet” (qtd. In Chadwick 46). Ample facts and statistics certainly supported the claim. Obama not only had enormous support from the Internet’s ordinary citizens, or “netizens,” but also from its leaders. Among his high-tech backers and advisors were Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, and Facebook cofounder, Chris Hughes (Katz 13). His campaign was also the first to include a New Media Department that was responsible for everything related to the Internet beyond the technical areas (Katz 19).

A recurring theme in Obama’s campaign speeches was that he was in tune with the spirit of the people, hearing their voices, and acting on their behalf to defend them. “Hearing the voice” of the people became an important subtheme of the Obama campaign and subsequently his Administration. Social media would be the way in which this voice could be heard and even influence his policy. In his speeches Obama repeatedly called for “active citizenship” (qtd. In Katz 13). According to Stanford Professor Jennifer Aaker, “Obama’s campaign used social media and technology as an integral part of its strategy, to raise money, and, more importantly, to develop a groundswell of empowered volunteers who felt they could make a difference” (qtd. In Katz 78). Rather than using social media and the Internet to solely disseminate information about the candidate and the campaign, Obama focused on voter involvement and engagement. With the use of new media and the social media in particular, the candidates could engage in deliberations with the voters in real time and in a very personal manner. This took the interaction between the candiadtes and the voters to a whole new level.

During the 2008 and 2012 electoral cycles, the campaigns of Barack Obama infinitely outmanoeuvred those of John McCain and Mitt Romney on the social media (Katz 119). So far, the Democrats were the ones who reaped the most out of the emerging media. The current electoral cycle has seen a dramatic reversal of this situation: Donald Trump’s social media operation surpassed that of Hillary Clinton by a very large margin. In light of Trump’s sometimes outlandish communication practices, it is possible that a part of his social media public followed him to check on the latest outrageous post rather than because they support his candidacy. Engagement metrics reveal how this strategy worked in his favour. While new media was used in the 2008 and 2012 elections, they were not new media elections. Each week, since the 2016 Presidential candidacy process began in 2015, Trump had an inimitable way of maintaining a presence in the social media spotlight. From television appearances, to speech rhetoric, to Internet posts, the Trump campaign, for better or worse, developed a marketing style independent of ads.

Twitter has played a huge role in the 2016 elections. Throughout the elections, Twitter was Trump's medium of choice, and for the most part he has been rewarded for showcasing his freewheeling spirit. Twitter's real-time nature and emphasis on brevity (by allowing the user to post only 140 words per tweet) make it especially well-suited for politicians and advisors. It is a form of two-way communication between candidates and voters. Candidates and campaigns can gauge reactions to their messages in real time, voters can easily share their views, and campaigns can track and respond to voters' evolving views over the course of the campaign.

When the traditional media became the mouth-piece of the establishment, Trump relied on the new media to propagate his ideas. Trump may very well have the most combative online presence than any other candidate for President in modern history. Twitter was a major part of Trump’s campaign, offering him a way of getting around what he considered to be a biased mainstream media. Trump used Twitter to speak to his people, his followers, transforming it into a virtual rally where he can use it to make a speech any time he wants. Trump’s success in communicating through Twitter boils down to a single quality, he sounds very authentic. He violated the norms and churned out tweets that were uncivil and offensive for the most part; a mavierick tactic. His aggressive, haphazard and unconventional use of the platform generated controversy throughout the campaign. His tweets almost always carried an anti-establishment tenor. Basically he created the idea that it is his personality that is shining through his tweets and hence gave them greater transparency. With Clinton, she was active on Twitter, but her account was also "more heavily managed by the campaign and did not seem to be as successful at generating news media coverage" (Goodstein, New York Times).

As allegedly advised by his digital strategist, Trump aims to use social media to cause “controversy—the more outrageous the content, the better” (qtd. In Roussi, Inquiries Journal). Appealing to popular desire and internalized prejudices instead of logic-backed argument, Donald Trump is a demagogue in the technical sense of the word. His understanding of the social dynamics and the ability to manipulate it in his favour was underestimated by the more traditional politicians, who viewed his campaign strategy as doomed to failure (Schwartzman, Washnigton Post). They fail to understand that through his tweets, Trump creates a sense of “personal participation”, that mirrors the word-of-mouth techniques and direct dialogue (Golbeck 89).

Clinton’s Twitter feed, meanwhile, was the antithesis of Trump’s – a digital strategy that was aimed at convincing those already on board not to jump the ship. But this focus on millennials, women and minorities, groups who were already part of Clinton’s core demographics, offered little to those not already backing Clinton. There was no attempt to reach out to the Trump supporters. Instead, Clinton’s campaign saw social media as an opportunity to preach to the converted. Her tweets remained largely scripted and uncontroversial, often referring to the candidate in third person. The Clinton campaign also had the drawback of choosing gimmicks over heartfelt messages that would resonate with the people. Social media Clinton was just as scripted as TV Clinton. It was filtered and not really as exciting as a Trump tweet. The role of the PR personnel in creating those messages was pretty much obvious from the content and language of the texts.

Elizabeth Cohen, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at West Virginia University, sees this as a telling misstep: “Trump doesn’t have the voice of a campaign. He has the voice of himself, and I think that has really gone a long way in helping him get this far,” (qtd. in Zaleski, Backchannel). Cohen has done research on the concept called ghost-tweeting, which is when a campaign surrogate controls a candidate’s Twitter account and sends carefully scripted messages. Though these tweets carry the air of a carefully considered message, they also increase the distance that the people feel from the candidate and the campaign. It is obvious that Clinton used a ghost-tweeter. Meanwhile in the case of Trump (even if he did/ did not use one), his messages resonated on a personal level with the public more effectively when he posted as himself and replied to followers on Twitter.

Anderson Cooper, along with her research team at Oxford University, reveals that more than a third of pro-Trump tweets and nearly a fifth of pro-Clinton tweets between the first and second debates came from automated accounts, which produced more than one million tweets in total. They were created by software robots, or social bots as researchers called them (Guilbeault, Atlantic). These pro-Trump and pro-Hillary Clinton robot generated tweets contributed to a surprisingly high percentage of the political discussion that was taking place on Twitter. Software robots masquerading as humans were influencing the political discourse on social media as never before (“US Presidential”, Indian Express). As Dhiraj Murthy puts it, since the number of followers has become a really important metric for people, it is important to know how many of Trump's and Clinton's followers are genuine (qtd. in “Bots”, Sun). A study conducted by the University of Southern California found that robots created 3.8 million tweets (around 19 per cent of the total) which means that one in five social media tweets about White House race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was generated by robots (“Bots”, Sun).

Political parties, local, national and foreign governments, and even single individuals with adequate resources could obtain the operational capabilities and technical tools to deploy armies of social bots and affect the directions of online political conversation. The people/groups/organizations behind bots, often create fake Twitter and Facebook profiles (Love, Reuters). These bots have become so sophisticated that they can tweet, retweet, share content, comment on posts, ‘like’ candidates, increase their social influence by following legit human accounts and even engage in human-like conversations” (“US Presidential”, Indian Express).

Magnifying numbers is one of the functions that the bots carried out. Trump often refers to online polls as evidence that he has “won” the debates. In the election, the size, strategy, and potential effects of social automation are unprecedented. Referring to the pro-Trump bots, Dhiraj Murthy posits that the hundreds of thousands of bots do have a noticeable impact:

“If you look at any tweet Trump has posted right when he posted it and you look at the people that retweet and mention that content, a bunch of them are always bots, because they are programmed to do that. According to Murthy, Trump provides bot fodder. There are plenty of really mean bots on the Internet that are looking for sexist, homophobic and racist language (Qtd. In “Bots”, Sun).

In addition to amplifying numbers, the bots performed other functions as well. Murthy argues that bots can keep certain things on the agenda and they can also propagate things quite far, depending how their networks are configured (Murthy 65). The right-wing white nationalists have used these automated proxies to artificially project hate speech and xenophobia on social-media platforms. But bots can also be deployed to drown out conflicting messages, notes Philip Howard, who researches on political bots. These bots are unambiguously representative of a particular party. For them, it is all “Crooked Hillary” and “Trump is a puppet”.

The chatbots rant, confuse people on facts or simply muddle discussions. In some cases, the bots would post embarrassing photos, make references to the Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into Clinton’s private email server, or produce false statements, for instance, that Clinton was about to go to jail or was already in jail. The pro-Trump chatbots would send messages on Twitter based on a topic, usually defined on the social network by a word preceded by a hashtag symbol, like “#Clinton”. By adopting hashtags relating to Clinton, the opposition bots were most likely able to wiggle their way into an online conversation among Clinton supporters. One pro-Trump bot, “@amrightnow,” has more spams with anti-Clinton conspiracy theories. Its competitor, “@loserDonldTrump,” retweets all mentions of “@realDonaldTrump” that include the word “loser”—producing more than 2,000 tweets a day. These bots represent a tiny fraction of the millions of politicized software programs working to manipulate the democratic process behind the scenes (Knigge, DW).

Bots also silence people and groups who might otherwise have a stake in a conversation, making some users seem more popular, and in the process making the unpopular ones less likely to speak. This kind of a silencing results in less discussion and diversity in politics. Moreover, bots used to attack journalists might cause them to stop reporting on important issues because they fear retribution and harassment. Of course not all political bots are malicious. There are parody bots like “@DeepDrump” or “@Clinton_Bot” explicitly dedicated to poking fun at the candidates (Guilbeault, Atlantic).

In the final debate, Trump and Clinton readily condemned Russia for attempting to influence the election via cyber attacks, but neither candidate has mentioned the millions of bots that work to manipulate public opinion on their behalf. It's not clear whether the campaigns themselves directly or indirectly deploy unattributed bots as part of their social media strategy to boost their own follower count and messaging or to attack an opponent. But according to the researchers who published a report in the Project on Algorithms, Computational Propaganda and Digital Politics at Oxford, the use of automated accounts was deliberate and strategic throughout the election (Markoff, New York Times).

The propagandistic power of bots gains strength from the fact that very few people know that they actually exist. The widespread use of political bots solidifies polarization among citizens; they are rarely mild mannered nor are they judicial critics. They always align themselves with an agenda. The bots also tend to circulate negative news much more effectively than positive reports. So this would result in the Clinton’s supporters cutting Trump’s supporters out of their network, and Trump’s supporters doing the same thing to Clinton’s supporters.

When people with differing points-of-view are cut out from the network, news gets homogenized. Homophily (the term that has been assigned to the social media user’s tendency to align with people like them) is particularly strong when people believe they have strength in numbers, and bots give the illusion of such strength. This in turn creates the band wagon effect, whereby the increasing popularity of a product or phenomenon encourages more people to get on the bandwagon too. The more people know about bots, the more likely it is that citizens will begin reporting and removing bots, as well as using bots to boost their own voices. Because the chatbots were almost entirely anonymous and were frequently bought in secret from companies or individual programmers, it was not possible to directly link the activity to either campaign, except for a handful of “joke” bots created by Clinton’s campaign (Markoff, New York Times).

According to Kerric Harvey, author of the Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics, "Both the technology itself [Twitter], and the way we choose to use the technology, makes it so that what ought to be a conversation is just a set of Post-it notes that are scattered” (34). There are different 140-word posts that present different points-of-view and it is up to the user to piece them together and make sense of it. Also the kind of tweets that a user has access to, will depend on the people that the user is following/friends with; therefore the access to tweets varies considerably from person to person. Harvey argues that what we do on Twitter around politics is not a conversation at all; it is a loud mess (77).

This kind of a ‘genetic’ constitution makes Twitter antithetical to sophisticated, thoughtful political conversation. Twitter makes political discourse more accessible, but the 140-character limit also means it is virtually impossible to share in-depth policy proposals on the service, making it difficult for people to get a greater understanding of the candidates' cornerstone ideas. Brandwatch, a company that tracks social media trends, found that on Twitter, from the time Trump and Clinton formally began their campaigns for President, only two policy-driven conversations were in their top 10 most-tweeted days. Those were Trump calling for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States, and Trump visiting Mexico and delivering a fiery immigration speech in Arizona in the span of 24 hours. Brandwatch found that none of Clinton's 10 biggest days on Twitter centered on policy, save for the debates; and even in that debate/conversation, topics like “nasty woman” and “bad hombres” outpaced others (Sanders, NPR). Social media, especially Twitter played a role in creating a kind of scandal-driven, as opposed to issue-driven, campaign where topics such as Trump's attitude towards women, Trump's tax returns and Clinton's emails have tended to dominate discussion as opposed to actual policy issues. The Twitter war that happened between Hillary and Jeb Bush is an interesting example of how political campaigning works on Twitter. It was a petty exchange where the two candidates were trolling each other. But for the most part it seemed totally normal in a campaign season like this one where campaigning equaled trolling the opponent. Twitter has transformed from a place where politicians make announcements to an area where the politicians fight it out every day.

Dhiraj Murthy argues that “the influence of ordinary people on Twitter” may be minimal, but that the medium can potentially be democratizing in that it can be thought of as a megaphone that makes public the voices/conversations of any individual or entity (59). Murthy continues to argue that tweets circulate in the form of re-tweets and that as a result a single individual’s voice “can potentially be amplified exponentially” if other users pick up their tweets and re-tweet them (21). This potential does not, however, mean that Twitter is a democratic medium because the power of amplification is also stratified: highly visible users determine what gets amplified and what does not. Twitter’s reality is one of asymmetric visibility; its democratic potentials are limited by the reality of stratified attention and the visibility characteristic for a capitalist culture (43).

Facebook was another social media platform that played a significant role in the 2016 election. Social media cannot exist without some kind of political involvement: where there is social media there is politics. Neutrality is the exception rather than the norm in social media. The Facebook algorithm is largely responsible for the kind of news that its users receive. Facebook presents users with only a small fraction of the information flows created by their friends (qtd. In Lee 24). If a 100 people of the user’s friends posted, and they all posted at the same time, Facebook would show the user only a few and the user would not even know what the rests of the posts are about. This reduced feed is even more bounded as Facebook prioritizes homophilous contents or those which one is more likely to agree (Pariser 95). The critique of Facebook is that it has now become an echo chamber. When the user goes through these posts, the facebook algorithm further narrows down the content depending on the nature of the posts that he/she has viewed. The algorithm that controls your newsfeed favours content that you've liked before and matches your own politics.

Central to both Facebook and Twitter platforms are the profiles of individual users, around which Schmidt’s “personal publics” (qtd. in Bruns 89) emerge. These self-selecting (and in the case of Facebook the self-selected) networks of ‘friends’ or “followers” serve in the first place as an audience for the account around which they have formed. The account owner is likely to be vaguely aware of the make-up and interests of that audience (Bruns 115). Social media users are also able to bring into existence a narrower, more exclusive, temporary “personal public” by directly addressing other users (Bruns 116).

The fake news stories circulating on Facebook also had a significant impact on the way people perceived the candidates. On Facebook, fake news garnered more engagement than mainstream news sites from August to November 8, 2016 (Silverman, Buzzfeed). From the Pope endorsing Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton arming Islamic State, fake news has become a powerful force to reckon with. Other interesting fake news items include, stories about Trump calling Republicans the “dumbest group of voters” (qtd. In Love, Reuters) and Clinton being linked in the murder-suicide of an FBI agent. On November 5, just days before polling stations opened, an article was published on a website of what appeared to be a local newspaper called The Denver Guardian. However, The Denver Guardian is not a newspaper, but a fake news site publishing made-up stories such as this one, which was quickly debunked by fact-checking site Snopes. A picture of Trump above a fabricated quote falsely attributed to People magazine has also been circulating online since October 2015. “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific” (qtd. in Love, Reuters) reads the quote. But no interview or profile of Trump exists in which these words or anything similar were reported (Love, Reuters). Though both these stories were found to be false, they were being circulated on Facebook as true stories.

Fake news stories serve different functions. Some of the trolls made fake news for fun, but others did it with a political purpose. Some put it out on the Internet as a form of persuasive communication, to try to sway or sow seeds of doubt in people's mind about the character of an individual, or group or there are others that can be forms of astroturfing, where the story is constructed by lobby groups or other professional or political organisations, to try to attempt to discredit someone. The fake stories associating Clinton in the murder-suicide of the FBI agent investigating her email leaks, or Trump’s remarks about the Americans as a bunch of dumb voters would definitely send red flags in the minds of the voters. A report in BuzzFeed News showed how tiny publishers in Macedonia were creating websites with fake news - much of it denigrating Clinton - which were widely shared on Facebook. Such fake news pieces could be the result of the above mentioned causes (Love, Reuters).

In his Berlin address, Obama criticized Facebook and other social media for disseminating fake news: “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect,” (qtd. in Mozur, New York Times). In response to this, Zuckerberg said in a post that “more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic” (qtd. in Mozur, New York Times). He went on to argue that, “I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea . . . Voters make decisions based on their lived experience” (qtd. In Mozur New York Times). Fake news shared on Facebook did not contribute to the outcome of the US election because the hoaxes were not limited to one viewpoint. For Zuckerberg,“The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics,”(qtd. In Forster, Independent). But in that same post, Zuckerberg also admitted that studies show that increasingly, more young people are getting their news primarily from sites like Facebook, and that young people have also said it helps them see a larger and more diverse set of opinions.

The impact of Facebook and other social media platforms on international elections is difficult to quantify. Fearing the kind of negative impact that it could have on their elections, some African countries banned the use of Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter before elections. Indonesia’s government also closed sites that promote fake news, though experts say some portals were also targeted for political reasons (Mozur, New York Times). But given Facebook’s global reach, which is roughly a quarter of the world’s population that now has an account on Facebook, is difficult to deny its influence on people and politics.

This US election has not spared any of the major social networking platforms. Donald Trump showed up and shredded Instagram’s friendly polaroid vibe. The increasingly nasty personal tussle between Trump and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush splattered onto Instagram, as the Republican White House hopefuls exchanged attacks when Trump posted a video mocking how Bush referred to people illegally crossing the border as “an act of love” (qtd. in Garofoli, Chronicle). Bush, who had been loath to respond to Trump’s endless jabs, took to Instagram as part of his new strategy of swinging back harder. There, Bush posted a clip of an old TV interview where Trump said he had “no idea” why he was a Republican (Garofoli, Chronicle). Mainstream media picked up the exchange, which shows that what happens on Instagram or any social media platform no longer stays confined within its limits.

Instagram is primarily a visual medium, where commentary is a minor part of the social exchange. It’s a place to shape and often soften a candidate’s image, not outline tax policy. The manner in which Trump and Bush used the platform differed radically from the manner in which Hillary and Sanders used it, and this made a lot of difference in the extent of attention that they got. Hillary used Instagram to soften her image as a career politician, by posting photos of people the Democrat met on the campaign trail and a few lines about the struggles in her life. Sen. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, posted clips of himself playing the train whistle while jamming with street musicians in Ames, Iowa. In contrast to this, the images by Trump and Bush were harsher and it is no wonder that those pictures stood out among softer images. In addition to the pictures, there were also videos of Trump, featuring him ranting into the camera at close range about China “taking our jobs, taking the money we have . . . nobody has a clue . . .” (qtd. In Garofoli, Chronicle).

Youtube was also used to a certain extent in political campaigning but the nature of its use differed from the social media. Since people started uploading videos about politics and politicians on Youtube, it has become the one-stop source for popular videos about politics. Videos which were posted largely consist of candidate ads from the campaigns themselves. The most popular candidate videos seem to be those in which the candidate says or does something not intended for viewing (“Bots”, Sun). Ever-present video recording devices have increased candidates’ exposure to an unprecedented level, and the existence of Youtube democratizes “gotcha journalism,” (Chadwick 22) allowing anyone who catches a candidate off-guard to self-publish the gaffe. The manner in which Youtube was put to use in the 2016 elections is unprecedented and extraordinary. The problem is not limited to a candidate doing or saying something in an off moment. Mitt Romney’s “free stuff” speech is an example. An old video could highlight the candidate making a speech or speaking in a debate and contradicting his or her position on an issue. The old videos of Trump talking about his daughter in an inappropriate manner and Hillary’s speeches on the benefits of the healthcare system (which later proved to be a failure) were some among the videos that started surfacing during the campaign season. These videos (recorded years back) were used by the political parties to discredit their opponents and to manipulate public opinion.

User-created political content and online Presidential campaigning on social media are here to stay. Gone are the days of the “gate keeping” role of journalism and the conventional mode of political advertising. The Post and the Times no longer have a monopoly on information about a candidate. Facebook and Twitter 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 counter-programming. This was one of Trump's supposed selling points — that his celebrity would outmatch any bias in the media, and that his own media savvy would make him unbeatable. Had it not been for the new media technologies that Trump had used so skillfully, he might never have won the elections.

Post the declaration of the results which hailed Trump as the President, many papers came out with mea culpas, like The Times which said that it had “reported on both candidates fairly.” The editor also vowed that the paper would “rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favour” (qtd. In Goodwin, New York Post). Sulzberger’s letter alludes to this, promising that the paper would “striv[e] always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you” (qtd. In Goodwin, New York Post). But had the paper actually been fair to both candidates, it would not need to rededicate itself to honest reporting.

The mainstream papers and news channels who have now apologized for their biased coverage would have never bothered to apologize had Trump not won the elections. They would have simply used him as a cash cow, for ratings. But the social media let Trump say what he wanted to say, in the manner that he wanted to say it. In a world which has a liberal bias, the social media was a platform where the right-wing supporters could freely express their opinions without fear of censure and engage in verbal combats with the left-wing groups. The problem of greater participation of the marginalized can be more or less resolved if new media is resorted to.

The possibilities put forward by the new media are not so different from those contracted by the traditional media. All things considered, the new media technologies were add-ons to the tradition of old media and not something that brought about radical differences. The new media was subject to many of the pitfalls that is characteristic of the old media. When Facebook talks about monitoring the news feeds to weed out the fake news or when Twitter denies Trump the “permission” to buy a particular Clinton hashtag, it is tantamount to censorship and control, the same kind of control that the mass media was subject to. The only difference here is that the role of the state has diminshed to a considerable extent. The power is weilded by a handful of capitalists who control the new media. Even when we talk about the new media giving voice to the certain marginalised sections, there are other issues. Though it increased participation in terms of quantity, there is still the question of quality. The fake news, bot tweets and so on misguide the people and prevented them from reaching a properly informed decision. As far as the debate that new media has been able to promote, it is mostly confined to abuses and personal attacks; discussions are for the most part naïve and superficial. Politics has turned from a place where people debated on matters of general concern to a platform for hurling abuses and passing snarky comments. Rational discussions do not take place. So the new media as a public sphere is a failure in the ideal sense that Habermas envisaged it. The new media is a highly manipulated/manipulating space and the person who understood its tenor and put it to use prudently won.

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Received on 08.03.2017

Modified on 07.06.2017

Accepted on 28.06.2017

Research J. Humanities and Social Sciences. 8(2): April- June, 2017, 244-254.

DOI: 10.5958/2321-5828.2017.00036.5