Social Media and the 2016 Presidential Election

The topic of this paper is social media and its role in the 2016 presidential election.
Annotated Bibliography
Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election.  Journal of economic perspectives, 31(2), 211-36.
Article posits that users of social media are more likely to believe news stories about their chosen or preferred candidate when the stories fall in line with the person’s ideological views. The article is helpful in explaining how social media and “fake news” works and can be used to make sense of the 2016 election.
Enli, G. (2017). Twitter as arena for the authentic outsider: Exploring the social media campaigns of Trump and Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. European journal of communication, 32(1), 50-61.
Article shows that Trump’s use of Twitter to communicate with the masses was more authentic than Clinton’s and thus had a bigger impact in the election. The article’s findings are thus helpful because they explain how Trump leveraged social media to win the electin.
Francia, P. L. (2018). Free media and Twitter in the 2016 presidential election: The unconventional campaign of Donald Trump. Social Science Computer Review, 36(4), 440-455.
The article argues that Trump won in 2016 because he used free media (Twitter) to campaign and get his message out. The article is unconvincing because Clinton could have used Twitter too. Ultimately what moved voters was the message, though the medium helped in Trump’s case.
Grinberg, N., Joseph, K., Friedland, L., Swire-Thompson, B., & Lazer, D. (2019). Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election. Science, 363(6425), 374-378.
Article claims that all fake news was consumed by people on the far right in 2016. The article is unconvincing as it precludes the possibility of mainstream news being fake, as The CNN Effect has already shown is indeed the case.
Wang, Y., Li, Y., & Luo, J. (2016, March). Deciphering the 2016 US Presidential campaign in the Twitter sphere: A comparison of the Trumpists and Clintonists. In Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
This article did not say much in the way of how social media was influential in the election. It focuses instead on who is supporting Trump or Clinton in 2016 on social media. It describes Trumpists as more polarized than Clintonists. The article is mainly subjective and unconvincing and comes across like the article by Grinberg et al. (2019), as largely rhetorical and slanted.