Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook (nymag.com)

Max Read makes his case via New York Magazine for how Facebook was the reason for Donald Trump's surprise victory on November 8th. Though, to be fair, "Facebook" is called out specifically due to its large online presence, but in reality all the "large and influential boards and social-media platforms where Americans now congregate to discuss politics" are to blame. The main reason why has to do with Facebook's "inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news" that is spread rampantly and effortlessly across the platform: Fake news is not a problem unique to Facebook, but Facebook's enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies -- i.e., the emotionally charged activity of sharing, and the show-me-more-like-this feedback loop of the news feed algorithm -- makes it the only site to support a genuinely lucrative market in which shady publishers arbitrage traffic by enticing people off of Facebook and onto ad-festooned websites, using stories that are alternately made up, incorrect, exaggerated beyond all relationship to truth, or all three. Many got hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of shares, likes, and comments; enough people clicked through to the posts to generate significant profits for their creators. The valiant efforts of Snopes and other debunking organizations were insufficient; Facebook's labyrinthine sharing and privacy settings mean that fact-checks get lost in the shuffle. Often, no one would even need to click on and read the story for the headline itself to become a widely distributed talking point, repeated elsewhere online, or, sometimes, in real life. When roughly 170 million people in North America use Facebook every day and nearly forty-four percent of all adults in the U.S. say they get news from Facebook, the spread of "fake news" is all the more detrimental. The problem is that Facebook seems "insecure about its power, unsure of its purpose, and unclear about what its responsibilities really are." Earlier this year, Facebook acted on what was right and wrong by censoring the iconic "napalm girl" photograph, later issuing a statement saying "These are difficult decisions and we don't always get it right." Of course, lies and exaggerations have always been central to real political campaigns; Facebook has simply made them easier to spread, and discovered that it suffers no particular market punishment for doing so -- humans seem to have a strong bias toward news that confirms their beliefs, and environments where those beliefs are unlikely to be challenged.

Comments

Re:Anyone have a list?

[Xenographic]

> I've lost track of the rationalizations, the reasons why Trump won.

Some humorous reasons, in no particular order:

* The Putin bromance helped Trump win the gay vote
* Russian deplorables prevented Syria from being annexed
* The details of Harambe's assassination got leaked by Seth Rich
* Flyover country problems
* The Secret Service tossed Hillary Clinton into the van like a plate of tendies and accidentally dropped her
* Pepe turned racist for the dank memes
* Bill lost his frequent flier gold status with Epstein
* Tod & Claire had to pack up shop after being found out for copyright infringement
* Vile Rat's guild took silent revenge for his loss in Benghazi
* Hillary accidentally deleted the email with the leaked debate questions before Kaine's debate, then forgot about it
* The 400 lbs hacker 4chan tipped the public off to Podesta & co.'s #spiritcooking in the secret basement of Comet Ping Pong Pizza with Jay-Z
* Bill & Obama's disowned relatives showed up
* Correct the Record's self-described "nerd virgins" were distracted by Melliana porn
* The Artist Formerly Known as Prince died, so he couldn't return Hillary's lost shoe at midnight and thus she turned into a pumpkin

Re:Or, Gary Johnson may have won it for Trump:

[XxtraLarGe]

Without him, and if Johnson voters had gone for Clinton, that would have flipped MI, WI, PA and FL.

So basically what you're saying is that if all of the Clinton voters had voted for Johnson, he would have won. Clinton cost Johnson the election, now we're stuck with Trump!