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Network neutrality is under threat and advocacy groups such as Free Press, Fight for the Future and others are pushing to save it. That's not how Verizon, one of the Internet Service Providers hoping for a reversal of Federal Communications Commission rules enabling net neutrality, sees it.

"You gotta understand, there are a lot of advocacy groups out there that fundraise on this issue," said Craig Sillman, executive VP-public policy and general counsel at Verizon. "So how do you fundraise? You stir people up with outrageous claims. Unfortunately, we live in a time where people have discovered that it doesn't matter what's true, you just say things to rile up the base."

The Trump campaign used data and analytics to capitalize on clues from early voting returns, including data on Latino voters in Florida, whom an undisclosed Hispanic agency helped the campaign reach. That's according to Matt Oczkowski, who headed up the Trump campaign's team of embeds from U.K.-based data firm Cambridge Analytica.

Oczkowski believes that polls failed to predict victory for the president-elect in key battlegrounds partly because many surveyed only people deemed to be likely voters because they had voted in previous elections, excluding non-voters being drawn to the polls by Trump. "We've seen times over the course of the last month that pointed to a potential outcome like last night," Oczkowski said. Oczkowski, head of product at Cambridge Analytica and former chief digital officer for Gov Scott Walker's (R-WI) short-lived presidential primary campaign in 2015, said the Trump campaign looked at early voting data around ten days before the election and used it to update its data models for get-out-the-vote and last-minute persuasion efforts.

America just endured its first presidential election in which the majority of the electorate got its news from social media. And the outcome is already prompting soul searching by the companies that shaped it.

Facebook will have to contend with mounting dissatisfaction over its role as the most widely used news filter in history. Forty-four percent of American adults get their media through the site, many consuming news from partisan sources with which they agree. The proliferation of fake news on Facebook has also been a problem: false stories about the Clinton family committing murder and Huma Abedin being a terrorist flew fast and furious despite refutations from responsible news organizations. Those stories shaped public opinion, said Ed Wasserman, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. "This is a landmark," he said. "Trump was able to get his message out in a way that was vastly influential without undergoing the usual kinds of quality checks that we associate with reaching mass public. You had a whole set of media having influence without really having authority. And the media that spoke with authority, the authority that comes after careful fact checking, didn't really have the influence."