By Marissa Lang, Jessica Floum and Wendy Lee, San Francisco Chronicle
For the last year and a half, the technocrats of Silicon Valley have made clear where their allegiances lie: With few exceptions, they organized for Hillary Clinton, supported progressive causes, pushed for looser immigration restrictions, donated tens of millions of dollars to Democrats and related campaigns.
By election day, they thought it would be enough. They thought they had won.
Donald Trump is the president Silicon Valley never saw coming.
Yet the very technology born and burnished in the region may have helped tip the scales in favor of the bombastic real estate mogul. For an industry that claims to be driven by data, there was another irony: Those same tools of communication and connection could have alerted the nation to the likelihood he would win.
As liberals searched for someone to blame for their startling upset Tuesday night, social media became an easy target.
Twitter gave Trump an unfiltered bully pulpit from which he attacked rivals and espoused ideas at all hours of the night and day.
Facebook, which recent studies have shown reaches nearly 80 percent of adults who use the Internet, allowed false news stories and partisan memes to circulate, creating echo chambers that insulated voters from fact-driven analysis, critics said.
Social media “is mostly the reason things turned out the way they did,” said Frank Speiser, co-founder of social media analytics firm SocialFlow. The election, he said, was driven not by campaigns’ ability to reach swing voters but by their motivating supporters to go to the polls by demonizing the opponent.
Social media, he said, “had the No. 1 impact on this election. Hands down.”
Both Facebook and Twitter rejected the idea that their services were complicit in Trump’s eventual victory, as did several other tech leaders who spoke to The Chronicle after the election.
“Scapegoating social media for an election result ignores the vital roles that candidates, journalists and voters play in the democratic process,” a Twitter spokesman said.
“That it influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a tech conference Thursday. “There’s a profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason why someone could have voted the way that they did is because they saw some fake news.”
But Speiser, whose tools are used by top media organizations like the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, said computer algorithms help limit the information people see on social networks. Tracking clicks, shares and likes on Facebook and Twitter allowed Speiser to make a prediction most pollsters and journalists did not — that Donald Trump would win.
Speiser had called the British vote to leave the European Union in a similar fashion. He’s not proud of it.
“Older voters were discounted, because they weren’t as loud and they weren’t as involved in the political process, but they were on social media from the beginning,” Speiser said. “No one believed me. Not even my parents believed me. It wasn’t like I hoped Trump would win. I was trying to warn people. ... Maybe they’ll listen next time around.”
On the day of the election, he said, social media confirmed Trump’s victory hours before it was clear which candidate had won.
“What people tend to do is they vote, and they go home and they read up about their candidate and post on social media about their candidate,” he said. “By about noon, whole parts of the country, swing states, were going Trump.”
The tech industry was shocked. To the largely progressive Silicon Valley elite, it didn’t seem possible that Trump’s campaign of isolationism, fear-mongering and racism had succeeded.
But had they paid attention to their own data, Speiser said, they would have seen what he saw.
In the wake of the election, some have suggested that people saw only what they wanted in the signals available to them.
“I was shocked,” said Elli Kaplan, CEO of biotech company Neurotrack. “It was a very eye-opening thing that happened, and I think that what I realized, which I think many others realized, (was) how deeply divided, how much more divided, our country is.”
With the exception of PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter who spoke at the Republican National Convention, most tech leaders embraced Clinton’s candidacy.
And though Thiel, a Facebook board member, may be the most famous political donor in Silicon Valley — his support of $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign and pro-Trump super PACs was loudly and repeatedly denounced by his colleagues — the tech industry donated far more to the Clinton campaign.
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz pledged $20 million to various pro-Clinton organizations. Google, Twitter and LinkedIn employees gave millions too.
Y Combinator co-founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, who are married, each contributed $300,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund, Graham wrote in an email. Almost everyone they knew in the tech world supported Clinton, he added.
“In retrospect, I wonder if any amount of money would have made a difference,” Graham wrote. “The main thing I hope we all do … is not get demoralized. This is one step back, but maybe if we don’t give up it will be followed by two steps forward. That’s about as much as you can hope for in politics.”
As techies’ post-election shock abated, several began looking ahead.
Some took a hard-line approach, like GrubHub CEO Matt Maloney, who suggested that employees who don’t believe in diversity and inclusion should leave the organization, and said he would fire Donald Trump if he were an employee.
Others sought to build bridges.
Amy Errett, CEO of San Francisco beauty company Madison Reed, wondered if she and her fellow founders could do more to put jobs in other parts of the country.
“The responsibility Silicon Valley has is to not villainize the otherness, but to understand the struggle and to engage in a positive way to create some impact,” Errett said.
She brought her 65-member staff together Wednesday morning to let employees voice their opinions, both positive and negative.
Jimmy Chion, an artist and mechanical engineer, is hosting a brainstorming session to talk about what role tech should play in elections.
“Silicon Valley’s values are to make the world more connected, to bring us closer together ... unfortunately it seems like it’s either backfired or we’re not doing the right thing,” he said. “We all might feel more connected locally, but maybe that’s not true nationally. But I feel like that idea is more important now than ever before.”
©2016 the San Francisco Chronicle Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
