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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.
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.
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'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
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.
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."
Okay, so I think the "kill list" really is pretty bogus, but the problem is you're using that to invalidate some real scandals.
Hillary really did work to evade the Presidential Records Act, then lied to Congress about it (see also: 18 U.S. Code 1001). Here's what the FBI found. Why didn't they charge her? Because she's was the Democratic presidential candidate and the charges go up to a Democratic-controlled DoJ. Guess what they'd do with the charges? Oh, right.
If you don't like that summary clip, you can watch this 3 hour hearing.
Here's her and Colin Powell discussing how to cheat the act. Kinda puts a new spin on why Powell endorsed Hillary, huh? Feel free to prosecute them both, it's only fair.
Source (click 'view original PDF')