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Guest post by Claire McGuinness , assistant professor in the School of Information & Communication Studies , UCD.
Depending on your perspective, the social media chickens have been either coming home to roost, or learning to soar recently. For information professionals, these are fascinating times. While the world has been contemplating the unprecedented results of the Brexit referendum in June and the recent US Presidential election, the simmering debate around the influence of social networking sites such as Facebook on the outcomes of elections and referendums has reached boiling point over the past few weeks. The outcome in both cases, which was the opposite to what was predicted by multiple polls, has led to suggestions that the polling systems seriously underestimated a number of factors, including the “power of alt-right news sources and smaller conservative sites that largely rely on Facebook to reach an audience” (Solon, 2016), and failed to take into account the deep polarisation that has been evident on social media sites, in particular.
