What Facebook Says About The 2016 Elections

With each election, social media is a becoming a bigger and bigger component in presidential campaigns. Barrack Obama's tweet announcing victory in 2008 was retweeted 157 times by his followers. In comparison, his tweet in 2012 announcing his reelection was retweeted over 800,000 times. It is no surprise that in 2016, we expect social media to play a big part in the electoral campaigns of Clinton, Sanders, Trump and Cruz.

A group of students at the University of California, San Diego, created a group with "meme elections" to gain some insight into how the supporters of each of these candidates use social media. They also posted comparison analytics from other similar pages to gain a deeper understanding of these differences. The results were astonishing!

With each user post counting for 10 points each per candidate who it is referring to, and corresponding likes counting for 1 point each, Donald Trump led the way with 204 points. He was followed by Bernie Sanders with 152, with Clinton and Cruz at 89 and 80 points respectively.

It was interesting to see, however, which of these interactions were actually favoring the candidate in question. So they split the interactions up into two halves – those bashing the candidate in question (negative points), and those backing them (positive). Once the data was broken up like this, it was clear to see that participants had the most positive outlook towards Bernie Sanders, who received 123 positive interactions and only 29 negative ones. Donald Trump, rather fittingly, had huge numbers on both scales with 91 positive points against 113 negative ones. Clinton and Cruz both had very low numbers on the positive interactions count, scoring 15 and 13 respectively. In contrast, their negative numbers were higher, with Clinton getting 74 points and Cruz 67.

As such, only Bernie Sanders had a net positive score with more interactions backing him than bashing him. However, in the context of social media's impact on the election, the cliché all publicity is good publicity may hold true in which case Donald Trump may be seen as the real winner of this meme war, having the highest number of interactions referring to him.

It is interesting how these results compare to the following of these candidates in other places on Facebook. Here are a few numbers to put things into perspective:

Bernie Sander's Dank Meme Stash FB Group: 439,000 members

Bernie Sanders Followers on FB: 3.8 Million

Donald Trump Memes FB Group: 192,000 Members

Donald Trump Followers on FB: 7.04 Million

Hillary Clinton Followers on FB: 3.2Million

Hillary Clinton's Dank Meme Stash FB Group: 3000 Members

Ted Cruz Followers on FB: 2.1Million

Ted Cruz Meme Page: 88,000 Members

Donald Trump has the highest number of followers at a staggering 7 million plus. Bernie and Hillary compare in their fan following, with Ted Cruz coming in last. However, it is notable that the biggest meme groups are the ones relating to Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz meme groups have a respectable following as well, however we were not able to find a such a heavily followed group for Hillary Clinton. These numbers, in conjunction with the results published above point to one fact – Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump seem to be winning the social media war. While Trump has the most followers and perhaps incites people to post the most, Bernie has the most loyal supporters online. Whether this online presence will translate into real votes come election day, only time will tell. For now, these numbers do point at obvious problems in our electoral system regarding the roles of pledged delegates and super delegates, who do not seem to be representing the public's interests.

The facebook group for the Dank Politics Elections can be found here Dank PoLITics

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