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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.
she and the Democrats abandoned the Rust Belt. Michael Moore described election night back in July: Donald Trump was going to take Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, plus the Romney states, and win. That's pretty much what happened, except Trump also got Florida. Hillary conceded Ohio, paid only a little attention to Pennsylvania, took Michigan and Wisconsin completely for granted, and lost.
Here's a list of the things Trump has promised to do in the first 100 days.
Of particular note is this item in the 3rd grouping:
Additionally, on the first day, I will take the following five actions to restore security and the constitutional rule of law:
* FIRST, cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama(*)
That is something the president can do on his own, without getting permission from congress. That alone is probably worth the price of admission.
Additionally, Ben Carson said he's willing to help Trump find a replacement for Obamacare.
Dr. Carson is smart and has first-hand knowledge of the healthcare system. He's not a career politician, and would make a good HHS secretary or surgeon general.
Check out the comments to that 2nd article, and see what people are saying about Carson.
(*) He doesn't say how he will determine whether something is unconstitutional, but in my view any reasonable method would work. Such as getting a consensus from a panel of legal scholars, or simply cancelling anything that orders the government to do something. We'll have to wait and see.
The DNC had a strong foothold online behind Bernie. Large amounts of youth waited in lines for hours to vote for Bernie, do you think they did the same for Hillary? Trump had the bored, young, white, male demographic if for no reason other than it pissed off someone they knew.
And that demographic hangs out on Facebook, Reddit and 4Chan. Tada, you now 'control' online.
Meanwhile when Bernie voters logged into facebook they were told they weren't wanted in the DNC or in November from a few people there to correct the record.
... the voting public do not like and do not trust Hillary Clinton.
That's part of it. There's also the fact that she made it very plain that she planned to give us four more years of the failed, ineffectual policies of O'bama, and rural America stood up and said, "Enough is enough!" and voted for Trump. If you look at a map that shows voting patterns county by county, you'll see that for the most part, only the big cities went Blue, and the rest of the state (even in places like California) went Red. In California, the Blue enclave on the coast had enough voters to drag the rest of the state into Hillary's camp, but in many of the battleground states, the rural voters who often sit out things like this made their strength show and dragged their states into Trump's camp.
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Its not a matter of "control" but getting the truth out there.. so much of what he said was pretty slanderous (blantent lies) and would under any normal circumstances (including him) be actionable in the court of law.. but no one did that.. and rather than keep FAKE news out, it was a matter of, let the disinformation flow.
If I started a campaign against you and lied (literally) at every turn, you would be firing up your axe and had your lawyers on speed dial. If I called out your flaws (not a lie, but kept calling out the actual flaws in you as a candidate) then that would be a different thing.
Virtually every fact-checking site has shown that 98% of what he uttered was a lie (most medium, quite a lot large, and some small), which is being regurgitated as "news". And Facebook (the "news" site it is (even though they keep claiming they are not) is doing nothing to stem the tide. And I say this not just for campaigns but also in general.. (my wife gets more scams and just false stories about so many things that even a single check the link shows its all false.. BUT.. most people don't).
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board -- Mark Twain Look for http://Thebar.steelbeachca
I had a thought earlier today: The internet is the primary vector for the worst epidemic of mental disease ever to strike humanity, on par with the Old World plagues that wiped out New World peoples upon first contact. Here's what I wrote about it elsewhere:
Fuck 4chan. They're responsible for this Trump victory. Actually, fuck the internet in general as it is today, but 4chan is where that shit first gained a foothold.
Trump winning this election happened because of the continuous shitfest of frothing-at-the-mouth rabid drivel that now circulates around 24/7 nonstop. The internet is what lead my dad to turn into a crazy conspiracy theorist who thinks that 9/11 was a coverup for the then-recently-revealed existence of extraterrestrial life awaiting our spiritual awakening ever since the fall of Atlantis at the end of the Pleistocene. It's also what's convinced my original-generation-hippy, lifelong-Democrat, now-disabled mom, who survives entirely off of social programs likely to be cut under Trump, that Obama is a Muslim building a Mosque at Ground Zero, and that Hillary is part of the Illuminati who apparently worship Satan on some hill in Oregon (according to the obviously doctored photos someone posted online), and made her vote Trump for her first Republican president ever.
Once upon a time I was under this blissful delusion that instant worldwide communication would lead to a new enlightenment for the populace in general, but it's become abundantly clear that the only thing keeping an echochamber of the worst, craziest, lowest-common-denominator "truthy" bullshit from drowning what few braincells most people have to rub together was the physical difficulty in that kind of craziness spreading.
I think there's an analogue to be made with biological disease here. Back in the days before modern medicine, cities were about the least healthy places you could live, because being in close physical proximity to so many other people (and animals) made it so much easier for disease to spread; you weren't air-gapped from most people like you would be in the country. I think the same is true of what I guess we'd call "memetic" diseases of the mind: nasty, destructive, viral ideas spread and mutate far more quickly now that everyone is plugged into the internet 24/7, than they could back in the day when they would be contained to whoever Joe McNutbar was ranting to at the local pub.
A further hypothesis: When the Old World first met the New World, the New World people died of Old World plagues but not vice-versa because the Old World had lots of previous exposure to plagues, having had lots of big dense cities for a long time and developing strong immune systems piecemeal over time enough that those plagues could just be everywhere in the Old World and most people were unaffected by them, while New World peoples with their sparser populations had no history of plagues (none that had any survivors to adapt to them at least) and so had both no resistance to the European ones and none to offer in return. I wonder if the earliest netizens, those of us who remember when UseNet was the happening place, are like the Europeans in that analogy. Those of us who grew up with trolls and flamewars and the kinds of crazy that the internet could breed... we got inoculated to it. That crazy was always still around but you know, don't feed the trolls and you'll be fine. We grew up knowing not to believe everything you read because the internet is full of lies.
But now the whole goddamn world is very suddenly connected to that cesspool of lies and madness, and they have no defense against it, so it's spreading like wildfire, mutating into ever-more virulent strains, and wiping out (the minds of) the population at large.
I just hope there are survivors enough to adapt a herd immunity to it some day.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Who is going to hold politicians accountable for lying, if not the media?
The media wholesale abandoned any last shreds of credibility this election favor of (fairly openly and overtly) doing whatever they could to make Trump lose. They lost both all credibility and the election, and so no longer serve any useful purpose to anyone.
There doesn't seem to be anyone any more who will put fact-checking before politics.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.