Slashdot Mirror
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.
that's why. it couldn't be the candidate or the policies that lost.
...that Trump won because the media could not control the narrative despite their best efforts.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Hillary is almost the perfect foil to her husband in politics. If Bill divorced her and ran as a Republican he'd probably have crushed her 70/30 that is how unpopular she is.
Look at her stats. She is damn near in McCain/Palin territory. She is the Nickelback of Democratic candidates.
Please stop living in a bubble and you will realize why it could have never been anyone else. How many established Republicans ran against him? Dozens, he slaughtered them for the same reason he destroyed Hillary. If you are looking around for a reason why he beat your establishment crook, don't look at Facebook, try the mirror.
Hoaxes were always there.
Trump won because Hillary lost. She lost it because she mistakenly took SJW outrage for actually what people think. Turns out, there was/is silent majority and they don't care one bit about SJW issues but do care about corruption, warmongering, foundation profiteering, and DNC machine rigging.
this morning, trying to figure out why Hillary lost. It was because the same party candidate after a two President usually loses. It was because she was a woman. It was because the current President is black. Now it was because of Facebook.
Absolutely any possible reason except that the voting public do not like and do not trust Hillary Clinton. She lost because Trump was less distasteful.
(And because he beat her at her own game, on her home turn. Her whole political career has been based on being so vicious and nasty that no one would dare cross her. And it turns out Trump was even more vicious and nasty. And Americans love that shit.)
So let me get this straight, the problem is that there wasn't enough control over the news by the Democratic party?
Never mind how Wikileaks shows us that CNN leaked all the debate questions to Donna Brazille to help them cheat. Never mind how the Washington Post held a clandestine fundraiser with the DNC with services in kind that they kept off the books, much to the lawyers' dismay. And we have Correct the Record's "nerd virgins" (their words, not mine) shilling for dough on every social medium possible, etc., etc., etc.
I wonder when they'll realize that their own propaganda machine is half the problem?
They don't know why they lost and that's why they lost.
Couldn't have said it better. They lost control of the narrative and were defeated. Fuck the media.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Or actually the LACK of the Donald's access to his Twitter feed for that last month...
Think about it. Every time he got into a Twitter war at 3AM over some foolishness that irked him, it got out of hand and he fell in the polls. So that last month where he stopped being stupid on Twitter is what cost Clinton the election.... Well, that and the fact that she had some serious flaws to overcome....
So, the next election cycle we make all the candidates debate on Twitter. Either side can initiate a debate on a question by posting it with a given tag. Points are given for the wittiest come back with difficulty points for quick responses before they can be fully vetted and focus grouped, as well as a bonus given for the time of day. All responses MUST be posted by the candidate themselves and they must personally craft every answer without outside help.... It will be a blast, trust me, and Trump will LOOSE BIGLY for sure.
The problem wasn't Facebook... It was Twitter...
sarc off
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Anyone have a list?
Just go from there. Whatever you do, though, you cannot mention the Pied Piper strategy. Because, well, see #1.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I at least as many anti-Trump memes as anti-Hilary memes.
That's kind of the point. Unfiltered access to the modern equivalent of the yellow press means that people were free to follow their prejudice (in the Latin sense of the word) down the rabbit hole of their choosing.
More people voted for Hillary than voted for Trump, but no matter the outcome, the margin was vanishingly small. Basically, people just chose their narrative and cleaved to it, nourishing and sustaining it with the self-reinforcing feed that Facebook provides.
Trump is not going to 'drain the swamp', and Hillary was never anything but the enemy of ISIS. But in the final analysis, nobody fucking cares. And why should they? We just watched two straw dolls dance for 15 months, each accompanied by a back story knocked together by the political equivalent of an oxycontin-addicted non-Union Hollywood hack who's just been told the franchise needs a new Avenger.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Idiots such as yourself use facebook.
I don't and I still support Tump.
The devs at reddit had a special algorithm running that artifically suppressed the trump discussion page from appearing on the front "most active" page list.
This came to light about a week ago, when the algorithm had a bug and stopped working, and the trump pages started showing up.
It was quickly corrected, though...
As more and more voting fraud is exposed, Hillary's chances will just keep increasing.
You mean like this kind of voting fraud:
http://alexanderhiggins.com/st...
You can ignore this if your reality bubble won't allow it. Surely Berkley must be part of the vast right wing conspiracy that Hillary's wrong doing gets attributed to.
Dealing with this problem that the news most people get these days hasn’t been carefully vetted as it was (or at least they tried) back in the days of Uncle Walter Cronkite is important. The Internet, with it’s ability to spread unfounded rumor at a wildfire pace, has broken America. I’m not talking about this current election, this has been going on for some time now. The question comes down to how does an organization like Facebook help keep down the levels of total bullshit without censorship problems. And I’m talking both sides of the political spectrum here. One way might be to take on a vetting responsibility in which bullshit posts aren’t removed but are edited by adding a statement something along the lines of “this statement is the most puro of bullshit” along with a link to something like Snopes where the issue is explained.
This won’t fix this problem, but it might help people see that there’s more to a story than what their good buddies or BFFs are posting on Facebook. And no, it’s not perfect, but it’s also not censorship. You can post whatever nonsense you feel like, but the owner of the site has the right AND THE OBLIGATION to watch for and flag nonsense. It would be nice if everyone had a working bullshitometer, but the newer models of People seem to have dropped that module.
CNN booted her for that: http://www.politico.com/blogs/...
Of course, this was just weaseling out, because Donna isn't the only one who was involved in this. But no, it's not fair to give one side a copy of the test in advance, that's just cheating. If they want to do that kind of thing fairly, they should just publish the questions in advance, so it's about ideas and policies, not about the media trying to tell us what to think. And yes, they were lying in that clip.
There were a large number of younger Bernie supporters that went anywhere but Clinton.
I know a few that went Johnson. Some Stein. Some just stayed home.
Bernie won Michigan (against all polls) and Wisconsin. Stein voters alone would have put Clinton over the top in Wisconsin or Michigan. They assumed wrong which way the fallout from the primaries would fall. The DNC got exactly what it wanted after throwing a lot of people under the bus along the way.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people just checked out of the political process after the DNC this year. Not changing to Republican but not turning out to vote for the Democrats.
The only conspiracies I've read about were those hatched by the DNC, which we learned about in their own DKIM validated emails. I note that everyone who posts things like this never bothers to give examples, citations or links.
Free thinking is about examining the sources yourself and coming to your own conclusion, including sources you're predisposed to disagree with. If you cannot even interact with ideas you disagree with, you simply blind yourself and you're in for a rude awakening when your filter bubble suddenly bursts.
Dr. Carson is smart and has first-hand knowledge of the healthcare system.
Unfortunately he is also insane.
#DeleteChrome
Carson is a retired pediatric neurosurgeon. He knows as much about the business side of healthcare as a cow knows about the inside of a church. That was distressingly obvious during his brief 'campaign'.
And it seems that age is catching up to him. He didn't sound or act like anybody I would want operating on me.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I think the election results disprove that only 20% supported him. I think the truth is a lot of people voted for him that did not want to admit they would. Not because he wasn't their choice, but because the left was so quick to label anyone that supported him as a deplorable, racist, sexist, bigoted misogynist. People that are not any of those things don't like being labeled that. What we're seeing is the attempted suppression of opposition by the left failed and likely actually fueled votes that may not have happened otherwise.
Next your going to blame the onion.
The people who believe whatever shit they read on facebook would otherwise have believed whatever crap their neighbors told them about something they heard from a friend of a friend.
Donald Trump won because of Clinton. There is no way around that.
If a person with decades of experience runs against someone who has no experience in politics and has no organized campaign (according to the media at least), and still loses, there is no one else to blame.
Donald Trump won for the following reasons.
1. The Mainstream media (MSM) kept telling everyone HRC was going to win, so everyone in rural America and flyover country made 100% sure their vote counted, and wow, did it!
2. The MSM would repeat anything and everything Donald tweeted or posted to Facebook for ratings and the hopes of discrediting him as a clown. This only gave him free press and brought things that were previously politically correct to the forefront for discussion.
3. Trump won, not because everyone wanted Trump, but because the people are collectively sick of the Federal Government constantly intruding in everything from small business to healthcare to trans-gendered high school locker-rooms. The people are sick of being called racist, biggoted, hatemongers or worse anytime they exercise their right to free speech and speak out against the never ending Federal Government Mandates. Trump won because he talked about all the unpopular things like illegal immigration, unfair trade deals, and the collapse of the middle class. Trump and Pence visited rural America and flyover country. They spent time there campaigning, yelling, screaming, brawling, and listening. Trump spent the last hours of election eve in Grand Rapids, Michigan a city with little political power and one that barely matters due to it's geographic proximity to rural northern michigan.
That is why Trump won. It is not because of Facebook.
Just like the UK, it was a full out revolt. This is how a democracy is supposed to work when they feel they aren't being heard. "The People" of the United States were heard this election.
It's all going to be ok. Trump will not destroy America. There is no need to move to Canada. The president is not king and only has a limited amount of power. The pendulum will swing back the other way for awhile and it will either work and benefit the USA or it won't.
In any case, it is time to stop fighting, yelling, screaming and come together to run the country again for the benefit of all. It will all be ok.
This election will be the defining moment for these online millennials as they learn to deal and grow the fuck up.
I'm still wondering when slashdot will do that. Literally every summary posted somehow can't deal with the reality that its (obviously) favored side just fucking lost. In this case it blames facebook, of all fucking things.
Never. And this election just proved it.
By my completely biased viewpoint, issues were discussed like 1% of the time and the cult of personality vs the brick and what they allegedly did over the last decades made up the other 99%.
Personally, I voted policy, not personality.
I also voted for the losing side. But I'm not bitter, after all when your candidates only redeeming value is people seem to hate her slightly less. That's not a campaign strategy. That's desperation.
It was The Creamsicle Charlatan vs. The Pantsuited Enabler!
It should of been on WWE, not our ballots.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
Why the fuck do that way. It's an issue at every election. Every. Single. One.
They need to do away with voting machines, period.
Here in Washington (not DC, the other one, no we are not part of Canada...) we do paper ballots. Most are mailed out and we drop them in any of 100's of boxes. There are permanent ones at libraries and the courthouse and hundreds of temporary ones during a general election.
We have a very strict accounting system overlooked by a bi-partisan pollsters at every step.
The mailed ballot has an outer envelope that identifies the voter, and an inner yellow security envelope than can have nothing written on it and the ballot enclosed and sealed.
After it is received they are electronically separated into districts and initially checked against registration rolls. They are then hand checked against voter rolls as the yellow envelopes are separated.
The separated vote then is removed and counted and all votes stored for a period (I'm unsure of how long.).
No problems large enough to make national news. A full paper trail. No internet, no machines to fuck up or be fucked with.
You can fill a vote out online and print it out. But the vote is only accepted at polling places or in-person drops as they don't have a second security envelope like the mailed ones.
Since it never touches the internet, you need physical access to do any fraud. That vastly complicates things compared to a few lines of code.
Sometimes the old fashioned way truly is best.
I don't know how costs compare, but with all the possibility of lawsuits, bad press, recounts and maintenance, I'm guessing it's not an astronomical difference. And I can be fairly confident that the counts are legitimate, as it would take some high-level fraud to cover up a paper trail with so many checks in place.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
To be fair doctors are not supposed to pass moral judgements on their patients. That means that a criminal gets the same life saving treatment as a boy scout. Was this a waste of a good heart that could have helped someone that wasn't total scum instead of this guy? Yes, but was it right to withhold the treatment? I'm not sure that it was.