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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.