Have you ever changed your mind about a political issue or candidate due to something you saw on Facebook, Reddit, or another social media site? You're not alone.
According to a new study from the Pew Research Center, 20 percent of social media users have modified their stance on a social or political issue because of something they saw on one of these services. Another 17 percent said social media helped changed their views about a specific candidate.
Still, the vast majority have held true to their beliefs during this election cycle, despite all the political noise on social media. The survey found that 82 percent of users have never modified their views on a candidate, and 79 percent have never changed their mind on a social or political issue because of something they saw on social media.
Among those who have, 21 percent had a change of heart about Hillary Clinton, 18 percent changed their mind about Donald Trump, and around one in 10 changed their view of Bernie Sanders. The survey also found that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to have modified their views on a social or political issue or specific candidate due to something they saw on social media.
"People who said they had changed their minds on these candidates often said that social media pointed their opinion in a more negative direction," Pew found. "Respondents who indicated they had changed their minds about Clinton were more than three times as likely to say that their opinion changed in a negative direction rather than a positive one (24 percent vs. 7 percent), and respondents who mentioned Trump were nearly five times as likely to say that their opinion became more negative as opposed to more positive (19 percent vs. 4 percent)."
The report comes as social networks like Facebook have come under fire for proliferating fake news. Amidst allegations that Facebook's human editors blocked conservative news from appearing in its Trending section (which Facebook denied), the social network ditched human curation altogether for algorithms. The results have been...interesting.