milnews.ca said:
It would be interesting to see research on voter susceptibility to different forms of messaging like this. I suspect that while things like memes and such produce a great deal of noise, most of it is probably expended within echo chambers and mostly just nods along with opinions already held. I have a great deal of people with different views on my Facebook, and I see both sides of this pretty loudly at times. My consistent observation has been that most of the shares and likes are by people whose political opinions have come across as quite crystallized for a long time already. I struggle to think of anyone where I've seen observable shift in political views that have manifested themselves that way. I suspect that among individuals whose votes are up for grabs, social media white noise is probably not a major factor.
Now, I'm not saying that memes and other online angstiness has zero impact. I expect it has some. But I'm leery of overselling the impact that echo-chamber clickbait has on the swayable votes.
Where I *do* think it may have an impact is in taking existent, firm views, and pushing them to be more crystallized and potentially extreme. I've seen few people change their views on social media. I've seen a whole lot from various political factions who've goten angrier, dumber, and more impermeable to other points of views, because increasingly their feeds get filled only with what they want to hear, and increasingly they are surrounded by people who will all mutually reinforce that anyone with 'other' views is (insert perjorative here).
