Social media is taken at face value as an equitable common marketplace of ideas and reporting. However, it is far from that; Algorithms do not evenly distribute peoples posts and are min-maxing based on what the higher ups in the social media company want the engineers to do; They have no fairness doctrine. Besides algorithms, political ads destroy peoples concept of who to vote for because they can legally bend the truth, or peoples perception or conception of the truth. An ads business model is just this - the more someone is exposed to something through a perspective the more they will like or dislike something based on the essence of that perspective. They are also targeted and inequitable to provide maximum political sway from the cash pool they have in hand. Exposure is how people develop opinions in politics. But in essence, people's inequitable exposure to topics on social media - caused by algorithms and ads - to anything surrounding the people they do or do not vote for will ultimately cause some of them to change their opinion on a candidate that they would not have voted for because of exposure alone. And often in politics, especially national, gubernatorial, or presidential elections - it only takes a small percentage of targeted naive or gullible people - by changing their political stance - to change an election despite everybody else not being swayed by the forces of social media algorithms or ads. In 2016 there were leaks about Cambridge Analytica capitalizing on this for Trump, who ultimately won. And later on, there were whistleblowers at Facebook who said that social media drove fear and anger as it increased user engagement, which also helped Trump as his campaign flamed fear and anger from an age-old political trope of immigrants causing troubles within a country. Also, over the last couple decades there has been studies of greater divide between people's political leanings which could not be attributed directly but people generally agree is partly because of social media causing redundant echo chambers that cater to someone's previous individual preferences that mire them in to a self-reinforcing political view. Also, exposure in itself is enough to change political views as that is often why there are significant pluralities of political views in pockets within the US and within families as there could be no other explanation besides one's environment.