Although recent national polls appear to reflect a comfortable lead for Hillary Clinton, Facebook's monitoring of trending topics suggest that it is theWikiLeaks dump of Clinton campaign emails which are grabbing the most attention, and not the recently-leaked video which caught Donald Trump making crude and degrading comments about women.
Trump dominates media coverage
Trump's troubles have dominated mainstream media since last weekend, leading Fox News' Bill O'Reilly to claim on Monday that at least three media organizations have "ordered their employees to destroy Donald Trump".
Yet, in spite of wall-to-wall coverage on all major cable news networks devoted to the Trump video and claims of sexual assault, Facebook's leading "trending topic" in the politics category this week has consistently been the recent Wikileaks dump.
In fact, with more than one million people talking about this topic on Facebook, the WikiLeaks email dump has surpassed the number of Facebook users talking about Donald Trump by a substantial margin. As of Wednesday, only 83,000 users were still discussing Trump, which translates into nearly 92% fewer users than the number of users who were talking about WikiLeaks. Both stories broke within hours of each other on the same day, but, unlike the Trump video, interest in the WikiLeaks dump has not waned.
WikiLeaks tops trending topics
By Wednesday, the WikiLeaks email dump, which reportedly contains emails sent by Clinton campaign staffers mocking Catholics and emails indicating collusion between the Clinton campaign and media organizations, has sparked more online discussion than all other Trump-related topics combined. Nate Silver's latest prediction of election results have 22,000 Facebook users talking, and the story speculating that Donald Trump made a habit of walking into the dressing room during the Miss Teen USA pageant has thus far failed to capture the attention of Facebook users, with only 12,000 users talking about this topic.
However, it must be pointed out that not every user tracked by Facebook's algorithm is a registered voter, or even a citizen of the United States. Nonetheless, the unwaning popularity of this topic may cause a dramatic tightening of the polls in the days and weeks ahead.
