Facebook use may have helped Trump with some voters, report says

Trump used Facebook extensively during his last two presidential campaigns, amassing more than 34 million followers on his official Facebook page before being banned from the site in 2021. — New York Post via AP

Using Facebook in the lead-up to the US 2020 presidential election might have increased the chances of someone voting for Donald Trump, university researchers said in a study published Monday in the academic journal Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences.

As part of the study, the researchers asked nearly 19,900 Facebook and 15,600 Instagram users to stop using the platforms ahead of the 2020 election. The authors, led by Stanford University professors Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, found some evidence suggesting that people who used Facebook might have been more likely to vote for Trump. They noted that their finding fell “just short” of being statistically significant.