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Facebook's Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash (gizmodo.com)
Facebook has been concerned about fake news stories that circulate on its social platform and how often such incidents occur. The company has had high-level internal debates over the matter since May, discussing different options to curb movements of hoax and false stories. Gizmodo reports Monday that Facebook executives conducted a wide-ranging review of products and policies earlier this year with "the goal of eliminating any appearance of political bias." The company even had a major update for the News Feed planned which could have supposedly filtered fake stories, but the update never saw the light of the day because it was afraid to use it. From the report:One source said high-ranking officials were briefed on a planned News Feed update that would have identified fake or hoax news stories, but disproportionately impacted right-wing news sites by downgrading or removing that content from people's feeds. According to the source, the update was shelved and never released to the public. It's unclear if the update had other deficiencies that caused it to be scrubbed. "They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news," said the source, who asked to remain anonymous citing fear of retribution from the company. The source added, "there was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after Trending Topics," and that "a lot of product decisions got caught up in that." In an emailed statement, Facebook did not answer Gizmodo's direct questions about whether the company built a News Feed update that was capable of identifying fake or hoax news stories, nor whether such an update would disproportionately impact right-wing or conservative-leaning sites. Instead, Facebook said it "did not build and withhold any News Feed changes based on their potential impact on any one political party."
If they hadn't been rigging the news feeds and injecting their own bias, they wouldn't have gotten into this mess.
Reporting that HRC had the election win all sewn up?
The auto-filtering criteria apparently caused far more right-leaning stories to be filtered than left-leaning stories, and it was scrapped for that reason.
So basically, it was bad code that they didn't know how to fix, and probably shouldn't have been in production regardless of the political aspect.
Reminds me of Steven Colbert's brilliant Correspondents' Dinner performance, which included gems like "Reality has a well-known liberal bias".
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias".
Not this past election.
or they were bad stories. The truly bad idea was in trying to implement a filter in the first place.
Nullius in verba
The most recent fake one that I've seen, with its supports absolutely adamant that it's real, is the "Clinton didn't really win the popular vote, Trump did!" thing. They defend it to the day they die, despite the fact that it's flatly contradicted by all official sources, can be traced back to the guy who made it up, and is based around factually incorrect statements about how votes are tabulated.
Not that the left is innocent in all of this. I still keep seeing that fake quote about Trump saying that Republican voters are idiots who will believe anything. How many times do you have to point out that it's fake for people to stop circulating it?
We need more fact checks, period. It bugs me to no end that news stations just broadcast politicians giving speeches and pundits making claims, wherein they may reiterate a dozen different things that have literally zero basis in reality... and just let it go uncorrected. That's journalistic malpractice, plain and simple. I know they want to jeep the pace of coverage up, but they're willfully letting their viewers get misinformed in order to do so.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
The auto-filtering criteria apparently caused far more right-leaning stories to be filtered than left-leaning stories... So basically, it was bad code...
Was the decision made purely based on the fact that it was filtering more right-leaning stories? Did someone evaluate whether it was because there were more false right-leaning stories being posted?
Fake news can and does from both political wings. I see no reason that Facebook cannot squelch bullshit wherever it comes from - impartially, transparently and fairly. And perhaps some (a lot) does target the right and it might spark a backlash to snuff it out. Man the fuck up and do it. The alternative of allowing it so the stupid propagates is FAR worse as we are now witnessing.
I on the other hand, have no fear of conservative backlash,
so I am happy to recycle this dated but completely true news story:
http://www.theonion.com/graphi...
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The truly bad idea was in trying to implement a filter in the first place.
That is the message that will go unheeded for all time. Let the readers do their own filtering. They do anyway.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Outright banning them is too extreme in my opinion, in part because of the appearance of or risk of censorship.
Instead, tag the suspect stories, or all stories, with a link to lists of alternative sources, viewpoints, and fact-checking sites for the claims given.
By the way, some conservatives consider politifact.com and snopes.com to be left-leaning. Evidence of this is thin, or at least doesn't show significant bias in my inspections. (I see errors in ranking judgement more than bias.)
However, assuming it is left-leaning, where is the right's alternative?
Table-ized A.I.
It's George Bush's fault.
If I recall correctly most fake news were against Trump, not against Hillary.
I am more surprised that despite the many word twists, omissions of context and outright lies about Trump he still managed to win.
Do not mistake me for pro Trump please, I think he is an idiot who is not half as smart as he thinks he is (especially that wall idea is silly), but that does not justify making stuff up about him, such as the 3 (or more) allegations about rape, out of which none proved to be true.
Or the twisting of his word which made him look as if he was against all Mexicans instead of only the illegal ones.
All of that was repeated over and over on the MSM and of course on Facebook too. Thats on top of the blatant manipulations of the newsfeed by Facebook editors in favor of the democrats.
Eliminate fake news? Jesus, you'd have to block CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, NYT, HuffPo, on and on... Would have been a bloodbath.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
...seriously?
They were afraid of a conservative backlash...BECAUSE THEY'D ALREADY BEEN MANIPULATING THE NEWS.
Jesus wept, people. How far down the rabbit hole of post-facto rationalization do you need to go? Even the NYT has admitted that they'd abandoned any pretense of objectivity in their coverage, to the point that LIBERALS were getting sick of it.
-Styopa
I would have thought that Facebook would avoid censoring viewpoints, however crazy. Once they start editing or restricting content, AFAIK they lose their legal immunity as a neutral platform. Once they take control of content, they become liable for that content. Some people get their news from tabloids. Some Facebook sites are the equivalent. So what?
On top of that: one person's "crazy" is another person's "entertainment" is another person's "truth". Remember the tinfoil conspiracy theories about the government spying on you? After Snowdon, they weren't so crazy anymore.
Finally, why are right-leaning sites disproportionately affected? Couldn't possibly have anything to do with the political leanings of Facebook employees...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The alt-right is posting more fake stories than the alt-left - 38% to 19%. Now, a lot of people will point to that as a "right is more gullible for fake news than the left!" point, but I see it as "even 19% is really bloody terrible".
A lot of the BS, mind you, isn't to say maliciously done; it's a consequence of the clickbait era that we live in. Many people - including even teens in Macedonia - have learned that if you make up something with dramatic language and a sensationalist headline, people click and share it, and they get ad revenue. Factual accuracy doesn't come into equation - if you can sensationalize a real story: great; if you have to make up a story from whole cloth: also great! A single widely shared article can earn them $3k in a day. So they create fake news sites like "WorldPoliticus.com", "USADailyPolitics.com", etc and fill them with clickbait. Early on many of them did it about equally with the left and right, but they found that they got more clicks and shares from the right.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Something only a liberal would think. Reality has a fascist bias. All your feely-good hugbox ideas don't mean a thing when the Islamist comes to saw off your head.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Which stories was the filter trying to block, and why, and how true/untrue were they? And which stories were getting rebroadcast more, which multiplies the score? We need statistics, and research conducted in parallel by responsible proponents of opposing viewpoints all around. Fake things purporting to be real things should be blocked from both sides. Of course, how can one do that without totally blocking all comedians and irony and sarcasm?
that would have identified fake or hoax news stories, but disproportionately impacted right-wing news sites
Which means those right-wing "news" sites were putting out fake stories. What's the problem? An algorithm doesn't determine what party a comment is affiliated with, it only determines the veracity of the comment.
But remember, Zuckerberg laughed about FB having an impact on the election. Because that's totally crazy.
Then again, based on this posting, it appears Zuckerberg was lying about FB being introspective in regards to fake news and the election.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It looks like maybe the Democrats have the issues. When you rig your primary to insure the candidate most hated by all conservative voters is guaranteed the nomination and then wonder why you lost that's called the issue of self delusion. No matter how bad Trump acted. No matter how rude and obnoxious. No matter what dirt was dug up on him. They still lost the election because they picked a bad, bad candidate and when an outsider challenged her they cheated and undercut him in any way they could. All so they could run the Queen. Well they ran her and Americans rejected her. The only people they have to blame are themselves. I'd be willing to bet there were hundred of other politicians they could have run with and won but they wanted the most corrupt one they could find that wasn't in jail at the moment.
There's a difference between being wrong and intentionally publishing fake and misleading information. Plus the fact that Hillary won the popular vote (by +650K votes and still counting) just demonstrateshow hard it is to call an election when there are several swing-state votes in the electoral college.
" You can't fix stupid."
And that explains Trump
Trump: "I will make apps applier and they will be bigly* great, the best appy apps that ever apped, and you will be apply proud of them! I know more about apps than Apple and goggle, or is it google?, and I will make them pay for it. Make Apps Great Again!"
* Some claim he's saying "big league", the debate on that continues.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm very left leaning, but do understand the importance of an objective, unbiased press. What people aren't getting is that Facebook is the press for the 21st Century. I feel they do need to realize this and figure out some way to deal with it. Otherwise, this problem is going to get worse and cause a huge mess.
Back not so long ago, there were three news networks and a handful of "newspapers of record" that served as almost the sole authoritative source of information for most people. If something made it into the New York Times or Washington Post or Boston Globe, the story was at least believable and researched. it didn't get there just because some reporter bashed some keystrokes into his smartphone without thinking and hit Send. But, this is exactly what happens with Facebook and other Internet publishing media. Fringe groups (on both sides!) who would previously never get the time of day are suddenly given the world's biggest microphone and access to almost the entire population. Using sophisticated, polished publication techniques they can produce whatever content they want and call it unbiased news. Twitter is an even more interesting beast, in that you get access to unfiltered streams of consciousness. Not that it did any good, but look at how many times Donald Trump took to Twitter at 3 AM to personally insult a person or group of people...people loved it.
Why is this bad? I hate to say it because it sounds elitist, but people as a whole are dumb. There's just no getting around it...the average person is much more likely to be swayed by something they see on their Facebook news feed. And since Facebook is an echo chamber, and hones in on exactly what you're interested in, "your" messages keep getting reinforced. Humans are animals, and civil society gets way less civil when people are screaming at each other as loud as they can.
The thing I don't like about this social media revolution is that it brings out all the crazy fringe people on both sides who do things like incessantly post angry comments to news sites or spend hours a day listening to conservative talk radio people...and gives them open free license to yell whatever they want as loud as they want. Over time, moderate people are going to drift over to these extreme sides in an effort to be heard.
I'd love to see Facebook buy Snopes and then integrate that into their news feed. Then they can add a Bullshit Meter to each story. The thing is, the best alt-right news isn't 100% fake; the best ones are about 90% true. It's when they completely manipulate information to present a twisted argument of when it all goes wrong.
----- obSig
Maybe I just have a lot naive liberal friends. I see lots of fake stories from both sides I would say at least equal amounts left and right. I just scroll past and I have stopped following some on both sides. I never challenge anything on-line because you just get incoherent rants from the poster and they do not hear what you are saying. It is not fake because they believe the premise. The facts are just an annoyance.
People will believe without question anything that matches their ideology or preconceived notions and they will vehemently challenge anything against them. This is true across all ideologies and probably true for the people at Facebook who saw fake news as a conservative problem.
Speaking of living in an alternative reality...
Obama nominated Merrick Garland three quarters of a year ago. It has been official republican strategy to block his nomination until the election so that there would be a chance that the next president might be a Republican and they could get a more conservative court instead. A strategy that ultimately paid off.
For more details, Wikipedia has a full article on the fight, with 88 references.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Fact-based journalism is dying. Yellow journalism is thriving. If you are one of those do-gooders that just wants to report facts and figures to a dwindling audience, then - to quote the new owner/CEO of The Oregonian - F**k you.
Mod parent up.
Not only the the Ds manipulate their own primaries to make room for the Queen, they also engaged in a "pied piper" strategy to put Trump at the front of the pack in the R primary. Instead of playing the game fair, they thought they were smart enough to manipulate it, and caused a series of unintended consequences that bit their junk off.
My D friends who were so eager to get me to vote for Trump in the primaries (I didn't, fwiw), talking down his negatives, and emphasizing their horror at the idea of say, Ted Cruz, are crying their eyes out now.
Radical Islamic Terror in the US is very rare - even if we include the outlier of 9-11.
Meanwhile, an anti-Semite has been appointed to Chief Strategist and hate crimes are on the rise. As a Jew, do you really think I should be more afraid of Muslims than of someone who hates Jews whispering in the President's ear?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Hmmm, does anyone know if there's an extension that looks up every post on snopes and puts a badge on it?
That's what I need.
Since you aren't using yours, it won't be much of a loss.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
>Obama's fault for not trying to appoint anyone to the Supreme Court.
You forgot your /s. It's hard to tell you're being sarcastic without it.
There might *actually* be some people who don't know that Obama has nominated a judge and the Republicans are the ones who refused to confirm him.
Of course, it's a matter of pure coincidence that Facebook board member Peter Thiel has been named to Trump's transition team.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The irony of all may just be that the anti-Trump "half truth" system is ramping up as speculation runs rampant on what Donald Trump will do as President. Trump has said a lot of crazy things, so it works because then you can start adding other things to take it a step further and make it sound even more extreme. A classic example of what I saw recently was one that Trump was going to start making Muslims wear yellow stars in public (a la Hitler and the Jews). The sourcing is false on that, it's "merely" going to be registering them and maybe given them ID cards, but why not just give it that extra nudge to give a cleaner Hitler comparison?
Once you give people freedom of religion, you give them permission to believe out and out lies. That's a feature, not a bug.
At the end of the day, what people believe isn't your responsibility, nor is it the responsibility of Facebook.
Bannon's not an anti-semite. And what's on the rise is leftist rioters beating people and setting fires in the streets. If Hillary had won and Trump supporters were doing this shit you'd be calling for drone strikes. Oh and most of those "hate crimes" are hoaxes. No Trump supporter is spray painting "make america white again" with a swastika on the side of buildings.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The question is, how much of the right-wing (or the left-wing) stuff is by actual right (or left) leaning people? I wouldn't put it past any of these party operatives to set up fake pages posting fake shit to discredit the other side.
650k votes is minuscule compared to the overal vote totals 121M+
Just because she got 2.5million more votes than Trump in California is not enough to use the popular vote as some sort of vindication.
"The goal of eliminating any appearance of political bias" is not the same as "eliminating political bias." In short, their goal is to improve their skills at generating propaganda, so they don't get caught as much.
From a conservative website.
I didn't say he didn't nominate anyone. I said he didn't try to get anyone appointed.
He made no effort, and his own party didn't push the issue like they did for prior appointments. Where was the media coverage we had when Sotomayor was up? The media has already admitted to being a tool for the DNC and working their asses off for Hillary. (They keep talking about how they were wrong, how they were biased for Hillary, how they underestimated Trump, etc. in order to announce to the GOP that they'll dance to the Republican tune as well.)
Yes, the GOP blocked it. That's how it goes. You never put your first choice first. You offer one you expect to be rejected immediately, then another you would love but will probably be rejected, then the one you actually want and expect to have a chance. This is true for everything from supreme court nominees to buying a car.
You made a big point of saying "three quarters of a year ago". What has he done in those "three quarters of a year" to get the seat filled? Sit on his ass? Where's the effort? If the defeatist attitude of "Oh, the Republicans will just block it." is guiding his decisions, why did he make the first nomination at all? HINT: It was lip service. It's a no effort, lazy, nomination with no push behind it. He fully expected it to be blocked and didn't care, he simply wanted to kick the can down the road to Hillary and a bluer congress.
It's all politics with them (DNC and GOP), and if you take anything at face value you're a fool.
Liberals think that reality doesn't affect them...
They believe that because in their experience it is true. Private college students, government employees with guaranteed employment and large pensions, the wealthy, celebrities. These are all groups insulated from consequences of their own actions. They do not experience scarcity and financial hardship. They receive an inequitable degree of deference from law enforcement and when they do get into trouble they can often buy their way out with money, lawyers or political influence.
None of the people I've known who grew up working their butts off on farms as children grew up liberal. Some Democrat, yes, but none liberal. When the only way the cows get water when the pipes freeze in winter is to smash a hole in the ice on the pond and spend the day dragging 80-pound milk cans of water up a hill in snowstorm, you do not retreat to your safe space.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Early on many of them did it about equally with the left and right, but they found that they got more clicks and shares from the right.
If I had to speculate on this, it's because websites like the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc. already fill that market. They've already built their brand and there's a certain legitimacy to those sites even if it's known that they are heavily left-leaning. The political right really didn't have anything like that, at least not on the same level. The only one I can think of that gets posted on the the internet regularly is Breitbart, and maybe Drudge Report but the latter doesn't really create its own content. Otherwise the right's main sources for media are still Fox News and AM radio which may not be as easy to share on something like Facebook.
I don't think Facebook can really solve this problem as creating an algorithm that can detect fake news would require some top-notch AI. Otherwise, actual intelligent humans will just figure out how to get around the algorithm and you get a weird cat and mouse approach. The underlying problem is that people want news that confirms their existing beliefs and not something which contains factual information or even an objective assessment of factual information. That's not something Facebook can do anything about.
In their desire to become some all-encompassing one-stop-shop for people, they had to anticipate that they'd drag in political discourse and all of the ire that goes with arguing on the internet. They could have just stayed a nice website where people could post pictures of their family or a recent vacation, but it sprawled out from there. I haven't used it in years (I stopped shortly before the big Facebook game craze swept through the user base and everyone was playing some farm game through Facebook), but I imagine its a bit of an overgrown mess at this point.
The only real solution is for users to engage with each other and point out the fake news. I recall some years (early 2000's around time of the Iraq war) in the past a relative of mine had emailed everyone in the family what was effectively fake news. It was something to the extent about Muslim's taking over America and how in a decade they'd be in complete control. I just pointed out that according to census data, Islam was a tiny minority and that it was essentially impossible for this to happen based on immigration and birth rates. Maybe things have changed, but this person did admit that they were wrong and emailed everyone saying that their previous email probably wasn't true.
You can't stop fake news, but you can train people to spot it and ignore it, removing the profit incentive. However, I don't think that's an easy task either as apparently humans have evolved to possess those cognitive biases and have a tendency to fall into them.
You're seriously going to post Buzzfeed for that? The other question is who measures truth or falseness?
They may be right about some of the info, but other points are wrong. To say something isn't being censored because other places post it is silly.
Let's take a real news story as an example. I mean, we've already seen YouTube take down the video of a completely different (true) altercation wherein someone has a minor fender bender, then several black guys attack an old man in Chicago after yelling something about him being a Trump supporter. That guy was dragged at high speed down the highway from his own car, severely injured, and nearly killed. YouTube repeatedly took down the video and gave strikes against those who posted it, never mind it being newsworthy. It has, of course, been captured to many other outlets.
Snopes rates the story as "mixed" because there was a fender bender prior to the video. I'm not aware of anyone claiming otherwise, even the video interview shows the man saying he only got out of his car to exchange insurance information. He never yells at them or hits back, but they attack him and steal his car. He fails to deny that he's a Trump supporter on the video.
We're supposed to believe that a minor car accident is somehow more related to the attack than what they scream about before attacking him, though?
Citation needed. I've seen a lot of trump graffiti, most of it says Hillary for prison.
And they wonder why we don't love censorious asshats who cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas.
The big-money establishment left keeps looking anywhere but a mirror for why they failed. It's not Facebook, guys, nor racism, nor whatever else you came up with. Clinton was simply a toxic candidate. She came across like someone from Capitol City in the Hunger Games, didn't give a press conference for nine months, barely interacted with voters (and almost never with people who hadn't already contributed to her campaign), but spent a lot of time re-assuring Wall Street.
There's no mystery here why voters rejected her. Heck, she couldn't even get the majority of votes from white women - no one felt she was going to represent them. Trump didn't win the primary because people liked him, but because they rejected the big-money establishment right. He didn't win the general because people liked him, but because they rejected the big-money establishment left. Trump won because he's so obviously not a standard politician, and everyone he ran against was. Elections are going to keep going further afield until "business as usual" changes in DC - and that's a bigger driving force than left or right.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm so glad that profits had nothing to do with with the decision. (According to the people who make the profits.)
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
So somehow, they have a platform where the users produce the content, and they make the profit, but of course that leads to a number of issues, like, exactly, can we trust the content. Sooo , i have a solution for them, start producing the content, or have each and single post validated, yeah, right, fuck me right?
You have assumed that there is a direct correlation between false stories, and the proliferation of those stories. It's entirely possible that say, the left pushed more of a fewer number of false stories and would still have the same market penetration.
This doesn't negate what you're saying, but keep that in mind.
Plus the fact that Hillary won the popular vote (by +650K votes and still counting)
I really wish people would stop talking about this. I'm NOT a Trump supporter, but talking about the popular vote is emphasizing an irrelevant aspect of the data given how our system is set up.
Trump and Clinton did NOT campaign to win the popular vote. If they were doing so, they likely would have skipped rallies in many "swing states" and instead held them in places more likely to get out the maximum votes for their side. That could have led to a very different popular vote split.
It's kinda like playing a game of Monopoly and losing but saying, "But, but I had more properties! I should win! I had more properties!" Except Monopoly isn't about accumulating the most property, it's about accumulating more money and bankrupting the opponent. Those are the rules of the game. If you want to play by different rules, fine... but that's a different game. The US election is set up one way, and the candidates "played" to win by those rules (i.e., Electoral College).
By the way, I'm not defending the Electoral College either, and there are legitimate reasons to get rid of it. But the mismatch here isn't really a strong argument -- if you believe that campaigns and rallies and advertisements have ANY effect on voter turnout, then there's absolutely no guarantee that the numbers would have been the same if the candidates were trying to win the popular vote and made campaign choices based on that.
It has been official republican strategy to block his nomination until the election so that there would be a chance that the next president might be a Republican and they could get a more conservative court instead.
That the Republicans then talked of further delaying for the next 4 years should Clinton win sends an even more ominous message that they care more about politics than the Constitution, the Country and *all* of its people.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Exactly. Trump won the popular vote in 30 out of 50 States.
I don't disagree with anything you wrote. I only made the point about the popular vote in the context of how difficult it is to call a close election when more people voted for the candidate who lost.
Still butthurt you little bitch? Pick a better candidate next time.
Pot, meet Kette..
Indeed what good is the popular vote for determining who the "real" winner is, when 40% of the country didn't vote? I'd buy the popular vote argument if voting was mandatory and we had 95% or more participation.
I disagree with the statement that Facebook is the press for the 21st. Century. If it's anything? It's a news aggregator.
The VAST majority of original content posted by Facebook users doesn't rise to the level of legitimate news, unless you're only interested in VERY local information - like Aunt Belma's Xmas tree getting put up for the holidays or your buddy Joe getting a new exhaust put on his car.
The reason people go to it as kind of a "news source" is thanks to all the users who like to share links to news article elsewhere they thought were worth reading. There's a lot of interest in news aggregators, as witnessed by Apple adding the "News" app to iOS and products out there like Flipboard. But what none of those can offer is a selection of news items curated by your own friends, relatives/family and co-workers. That's where Facebook comes in.
Big Pharma is landing a windfall of profits from all the anti-anxiety prescriptions that are written as a result of white midwesterners reading stories about how Paris is under siege by muslims.
Think about the shareholders!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Though I'm sure the majority of people on here (and gizmodo) will believe that stupid excuse anyway. When has FB ever given a crap about 'conservative backlash' or conservatives in general? Zuckerberg is another slimy liberal anti-capitalist billionaire (money he acquired via the capitalism he hates) that wants to blame conservatives for everything he doesn't agree with. Now that the US has seen through the liberal bullshit and voted that corruptocrat Clinton out of politics, Zuck's got his panties in a twist and is throwing a tantrum.
These liberal idiots just can't handle reality.
Pax Vobiscum
they wanted the most corrupt one they could find that wasn't in jail at the moment.
Unfortunately, given how BOTH Trump and Clinton have been under investigations (as well as many aids, new proposed members of the Trump cabinet and team, etc.), I think that should almost be a motto for the modern political system -- "Finding the most corrupt people who aren't in jail at the moment."
I would just like to know how Facebook was defining "fake or hoax news stories" for the purposes of their filter.
Not only do they not care, they haven't for years now on Facebook. I grew up in rural area in a red state. The people I went to high school with and are friends with on Facebook are pretty strong Republican Party supporters. They truly don't care about the truth of any story they share any more. For those of you who don't know, one of the ways that right wing lies get spread on Facebook is that they got people convinced that Snopes is in fact dishonest and pushing a liberal agenda and you can't trust if for anything. I've seen people I know argue this when someone points them to Snopes to rebut some nonsense they are sharing. These people are in turn now convinced that you can't verify anything any more because anything that disagrees with what you agree with is a lie itself. They don't even question what they are sharing either, which is a real shame. I have to admit to really losing a lot of respect for some of my old school friends who I know are smart enough to think critically about what they are reading, but they don't care any more to do so.
There are many mirrors being ignored. Trump wiped the floor with Jeb, Cruz and Rubio before he defeated Hillary. Watching the Sunday morning talk shows this weekend gave the impression that about as many high-ups in the Republican party seem to believe that they won this Presidential election as there were people running the DNC that thought Hillary's loss was due to everything but the Democratic party.
Hillary and the Democrats were given a golden opportunity in an opponent like Trump. They ignored the progressive populism that could have brought many new voters to the polls on election day. The Dems also took for granted too many traditional voting blocks that should have been courted. Labelling a large portion of the population as deplorable, xenophobic racists didn't win Hillary any cross over votes and turned many people against her. The Democrats seem to be acting as if they did nothing wrong in the 2016 election.
The Republicans now have a golden opportunity, but they will have to accept that their message did not win the election, Trump's message did. They can make this a way to rebuild their party. Programs based on need, not race. Government that delivers for all, not just handouts for the poor and tax breaks for the rich. Equal justice for all Americans, of all races. The Republicans can transform their party and truly do something great.
They'll probably just use it to shovel trillions of dollars in defense and security funding to the biggest donors to their elections and run up the national debt like they usually do, but they have the opportunity to do something big.
If the Republicans try to run this administration like they have in the past, and they ignore the populist themes that caused their chosen ones to get beaten, just as Hillary ignored so many, they will pay a big price in the 2018 mid-term elections. The Republicans are in a great position to take advantage of the mood in America, if they can actually do some good for working, middle class Americans in the next two years and be inclusive of all of those Americans, regardless of race. They need to put aside the history of the Republican party being the party of the already rich and embrace this new opportunity.
Look, there's a lot of fake stuff out there, doctored photos, Russian lies, fake Greek/Macedonian bots, and even tagging Fake News with (probably untrue) would have been useful to FB users.
But, no, had to sell out due to Fear.
Which is what the alt-right want.
They want you to live in Fear.
They regard 1984 as a plan, not a warning.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If we follow the standard method of interpreting these kinds of things, "Disparate Outcome", then it doesn't matter what the facts f he matter are, it is inherently discriminatory.
Hey, not my rules...
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The problem is the news is written in a way for us to react to it. (Both Conservative leaning and liberal leaning).
Instead of news spitting out catchy headlines, I would like more time dedicated to in depth look at what is going on and the details behind it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
And news of Clinton's transgressions and Wikilieaks revelations were quite obviously suppressed. It's not just FB either, Twitter did that too, and so did Reddit and Youtube. Google has banned "clinton health problems" from autocomplete, among other things. FB executives made no secret whatsoever out of where their loyalties lie. A little Google birdie told me Ruth Porat (CFO of Google) wept during weekly company meeting after Clinton defeat, and levels of SJW activity (and therefore Trump supporter suppression) have markedly increased inside Google after Trump won the election, despite being already crazy high in the months prior. Don't fucking be telling me that the big tech companies or mainstream media helped Trump in any way whatsoever. He won against all odds because people who are tired of all this bullshit used their right to a confidential vote.
Someone on the internet joked that if Trump walked on water, healed cripples and turned water into wine, the headlines would be: "Trump can't swim", "Trump takes jobs from doctors" and "Trump is a raging alcoholic". That's not far from the truth. I hope this is obvious to everybody. Give the man the benefit of the doubt. He has no other reason to run for presidency than to do good for this country. His version of "good", but "good" nevertheless. Don't believe the propaganda, he's not "literally Hitler". You'll all be fine (except for immegal aliens with criminal records, you guys can start heading to the border as we speak). The country will be fine. Just do your part to, quite literally, make America great again.
Did someone evaluate whether it was because there were more false right-leaning stories being posted?
Of course there are. The right has been much faster to adopt post truth politics. I used to live in eastern Tennessee and have plenty of alt-right relatives, and I am amazed at some of the nonsense they are willing to believe, and how immune they are to factual information. For instance, my idiot brother-in-law has emailed me petitions 3 times to stop atheist activist Madalyn Murray O'Hare from banning any mention of God on TV, despite the fact that I have told him each time that 1) Her name is spelled "O'Hair", 2) She has no authority over what is on TV, 3) She has been dead for more than 20 years. None of that matters to him, and now he thinks I am part of the God denying conspiracy.
It looks like maybe the Democrats have the issues. When you rig your primary to insure the candidate most hated by all conservative voters is guaranteed the nomination and then wonder why you lost that's called the issue of self delusion. No matter how bad Trump acted. No matter how rude and obnoxious. No matter what dirt was dug up on him. They still lost the election because they picked a bad, bad candidate and when an outsider challenged her they cheated and undercut him in any way they could. All so they could run the Queen. Well they ran her and Americans rejected her. The only people they have to blame are themselves. I'd be willing to bet there were hundred of other politicians they could have run with and won but they wanted the most corrupt one they could find that wasn't in jail at the moment.
I'm probably going to be modded into oblivion for pointing this out (wouldn't be the first time either) but Republican primaries process isn't exactly free of issues by any stretch of the imagination. The same goes for the Electoral College which allows the runner up who lost the election by 2 million bloody votes to become president. People keep telling me that the Electoral College is essential to US democracy and blah, blah, blah ... I call bullshit on all of it. The president should be elected by popular vote, period! Then there is the fucked up US electoral system riddled as it is with gerrymandering. I just heard a political analyst on TV recommend that the Dems. should put some effort back into state level politics. The implication of this person's advice seemed to be that if they did that, they could gerrymander the system back in their favour .... seriously?!?! By the looks of it practically every step of the US electoral process from the primaries onwards is in serious need of reform. It's easy for the Republicans to feel smug right about now, they control both houses of congress and they may or may not control the president (the jury is still out on that question). What they should be is worried because this victory they have scored is largely a victory achieved by gaming the system while demographics are slowly working against them. The fastest growing communities in the US are non-white while the Republican voter base is shrinking. If the Democrats spend the next few years rebuilding a grass roots organisation, realise that their most important base is not the Wall Street bankers and tech billionaires they spend most of their time sucking up to but working class white and non-white citizens. If the Democrats go back to their roots and draw some of those working class voters away from the likes of Trump with a Roosevelt style 'New Deal program' the Republicans will be in real trouble because endorsements form the KKK are not going to increase their appeal to that rapidly expanding group of non-white voters. In the end even expert gerrymandering will not be able to save the Republicans from their shrinking voter base. Only a move towards the political centre and away from KKK endorsements can do that. Say what you want, even if the Reps/Trump did not accept the KKK endorsement the mere fact that they got it is a very bad sign for the Reps. As for the Democrats there is an old Norse saying, "Don't mourn, gather men, arm yourselves and avenge" and that is my advice to them. Leave the Republicans to revel in their smugness and schadenfreude. Spend the next two years ousting the old Democrat establishment, bring in some new people, reform the primaries, take your party back to its core message and values and then kick the Reps. in the balls in 2018/2020 with a steel toe boot.
No, especially this past election. This year reality was so rife with liberal bias that no news source was trustworthy other than Donald Trump himself, far-right news sites, and conspiracy blogs. Clearly reality cannot be trusted.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Tagging 'Hillary for Prison' constitutes a 'hate crime'?
Instead, maybe they should have a tiered rating system:
Outside of people's FB pages, we should be free to browse the pools of all stories in each category, even the deleted verified fake ones, so we can satisfy ourselves that there's no systematic bias going on by people with verification power.
Trump is Apps Guy!?
You wrote:
Yes, he did. And they blocked it. So what the hell should he have done? Thrown congress in jail unless they complied? Read the Wikipedia article about the process - they did try to peel off Republicans, but they only tightened ranks. So then what? What exactly are they supposed to have done to stop it?
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
It looks like maybe the Democrats have the issues. When you rig your primary to insure the candidate most hated by all conservative voters
I agree with you, but this misses the mark. Modern conservatives are very unlikely to vote for most of the people that the Democrats would run for President. I'm an independent who votes for both parties, so it's my vote they're courting.
That said, Hillary was hated by people like me, too, and that's the problem. I never would have thought it possible for the Democrats to run a candidate bad enough that I would hope for a Trump win but I actually found myself happy that he won.
Hillary's a left-wing coastal elitist from Arkansas. I cannot wrap my head around that, but that's what she is. Her "basket of deplorables" comment was so over the top - I mean, I honestly wondered if Trump didn't have a mole in her speech-writing team when she said that. Trump's supporters took it as a badge of honor to be called such by a rich left-wing elitist.
I could go on and on, but you get the point.
Do you have ESP?
None of the people I've known who grew up working their butts off on farms as children grew up liberal. Some Democrat, yes, but none liberal. When the only way the cows get water when the pipes freeze in winter is to smash a hole in the ice on the pond and spend the day dragging 80-pound milk cans of water up a hill in snowstorm, you do not retreat to your safe space.
All the people I've known who grew up in big cities grew up liberal. Cities aren't "safe spaces" (ask any small town conservative). You have to learn to get along with people who are not like you, and you realize that there is a big complicated world that doesn't revolve around you and your "deeply held beliefs".
BTW, I live in a city where it freezes in the winter. We insulate our pipes.
It's a platform for people to share, if Facebook started filtering what is shared, they are fighting their Unique Sales Position. The part I find annoying is the "Suggested Posts" and the "People also shared", Google penalises for plagiarism and lack of timeliness, shouldn't be too difficult for Facebook to do the same. A lot of the sites I get dragged into have the same content verbatim, I guess I'm what facebook would consider Alt-Right, and a good deal of what I see looks like the Progressive-Liberal stereotypes amplified, likewise a good deal of what my Progressive friends post looks like Alt-Right stereotype of the progressives.
I think have more ads on a page than content should be a penalty as well, especially if the ads cause popups and double penalties if the ads go to a "Mircosoft Driver Update" page or a dingit.tv ad.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
on Earth based on believing lies IS my business, because it's so f*cking dangerous.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I would get rid of Electoral College all together. I would also required a candidate getting a true majority of votes. In this case since both fell below 50%, there would be a new election and only candidates that got at least 10% (this % up for debate) of the 1st vote would be eligible for the 2nd vote and no write-ins allowed.
Let's bring back some democracy to our election.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Here's an excellent explanation why the system was set up to have an electoral college: https://geopoliticalfutures.co...
"The United States is a geopolitical invention. The 13 original colonies were very different from each other. As the nation expanded westward, even more exotic states became part of the union. Constantly alienating smaller states through indifference could undermine the national interest. The Senate and the electoral college both stop that from happening, or at least limit it. Any state can matter in any election.
You might charge that this is undemocratic. It is. It was intended to be. The founders did not create a direct democracy for a good reason. It would have prevented the United States from emerging as a stable union. They created a republican form of government based on representation and a federal system based on sovereign states. Because of that, a candidate who ignores or insults the “flyover” states is likely to be writing memoirs instead of governing."
I do remember a much larger backlash when Obama won 8 years ago. I had to instantly delete about 5 people from my Facebook friends list for racist, violent posts.
Granted those were words and not actions.. but I wonder how many of the rioters are truly there for politics or just there to cause trouble. Unfortunately it seems that regardless of the original meaning of mass gatherings, it only takes a few instigators to ruin it for all.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
What a joke. US farmers are some of the biggest welfare queens on the planet. No one is dragging 80 pound milk cans of water by hand.
and now he thinks I am part of the God denying conspiracy.
"I hadn't been, dumbass, but now I'm strongly considering it."
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The Republicans now have a golden opportunity, but they will have to accept that their message did not win the election, Trump's message did. They can make this a way to rebuild their party.
I fully expect them not to get it, and 2018 to be brutal. The anti-incumbency wave that started in the late 90s continues to rise.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
They didn't know that the prohibition against news propaganda expired within the past couple of years?
And didn't take advantage of it?
Fucking idiot politicians. Oh, sorry, I repeated myself with those adjectives.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Let the readers do their own filtering. They do anyway.
I believe you have hit the nail on the thumb: The overriding problem is that THEY DON'T. Or that their filtering criteria do not include "reality".
This might just be the dumbest thing I've ever read: The majority of social media users do no filtering at all, beyond the filtering that was done when they chose their circle of friends. Even the most transparently obvious fake stories are parroted ad infinitum in what is essentially an echo chamber for idiocy.
there's a certain legitimacy to those sites even if it's known that they are heavily left-leaning.
Left-leaning is not fake - and "leaning" either way is acceptable when it is open and honest. For example, I trust The Wall Street Journal to be consistent and thorough, knowing that they will be biased towards big business because that's their audience. The New Yorker, on the other hand, does well-researched reporting with a liberal focus, and is also consistent and thorough, because that is their audience. The problem is when something claims to be factual, or balanced, when it is not.
Thing is that a majority of Jews in the US are Left leaning, and even the Right leaning ones in the GOP primaries were anti-Trump. So it's easy to conclude that Jews == anti-Trump. While there are indeed some Trump supporters on YouTube pages who are anti-Jewish, the fact that Jared Kushner is highly influential and that Ivanka converted to Judaism to marry him should make it obvious that Trump, of all people, wouldn't lead an anti-Jewish administration
None of the people I've known who grew up working their butts off on farms as children grew up liberal. Some Democrat, yes, but none liberal. When the only way the cows get water when the pipes freeze in winter is to smash a hole in the ice on the pond and spend the day dragging 80-pound milk cans of water up a hill in snowstorm, you do not retreat to your safe space.
The same reason why everyone here in rural western Ohio identifies at Catholic and as Browns fans (NFL). These aren't choices the children made, they were beliefs passed down by their parents and most of the kids never move far enough from home to experience anything out of their comfort zone.
I grew up Catholic, a Browns fan, and Conservative. Religion for me was gone by middle school, probably helps that we were C&E (Christmas and Easter) Catholics except when visiting my grandmother. Never cared enough about the NFL to stick with the Browns. It was my political leaning that remained with me the longest.
But then I started traveling in my early 20s. First it was seeing more of the US, then it was to Brazil a couple times, then to Asia and finally a couple countries in Europe. What I realized is that while the US is a great place, there is so much we can do better. It just happens that the Democrats at least talk about accomplishing some of those things while Republicans wish the 1950s would return.
Since you used hard working farmers as your example, let's not forget that many receive substantial government subsidies.
The tl;dr version is that most people have beliefs imprinted at an early age and rarely adjust their thinking.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
You're being willfully ignorant, or denying reality. Obama pushed all kinds of things, and was blocked on all fronts through rules-lawyering. The problem is there was no compromise. This particular candidate was NOT the first choice; Obama went directly to a compromise candidate who had been praised by Republicans when they approved him for a lower position. The contrast between that earlier praise, and the current refusal to even TALK to or about him, should have generated enough outrage from both sides to get SOMETHING achieved; but we have gotten so used to this complete dysfunctional Congress that the issue just died. I'll agree with you, Obama expected the can to be kicked down the road, but HE didn't do it; he made an offer and the OTHER side did it. But nobody cares.
The majority of social media users do no filtering at all
That would be a personal problem, not one for the site owners to deal with.
This might just be the dumbest thing I've ever read
That leads to the assumption you don't read much :-)
Peace!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
4) He just voted in an Atheist for POTUS.
Also the "Left are rioting, we didn't!" claim ignores the situation that violence seems to be everywhere right now. Plenty of "sore winner" Trump fans beating up people, plenty of pro-Trump or fascist vandalism, etc.
So the smug lectures from the right about how they didn't riot (guess what! I didn't either!) are woefully misplaced.
I've no idea what the motives of those "rioting" at anti-Clinton rallies are. But right now I know people are legitimately terrified of what Trump is bringing. With Trump supporters telling people in front of their children they're going to be deported, with Jewish journalists sent pictures of their children being gassed in ovens by a smiling Trump, and with Trump's own violent and hate filled rhetoric, they have good reason to be scared.
Let's not pretend this is an ordinary election.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Also, Breitbart is always running pro-Israel stories and documenting anti-Semitic attacks by Muslims in Europe with the rise of the refugee crisis. If he hates Jews he's got a funny way of showing it.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
. It's not Facebook, guys, nor racism, ... There's no mystery here why voters rejected her. Heck, she couldn't even get the majority of votes from white women
Your facts are in violent disagreement with your conclusions.
I really wish people would keep talking about this, because it emphasizes what's broken with our presidential election. The electoral system is useless. It does not serve the original function of independently choosing a president, nor does it serve to represent the popular vote.
Actually, talking about it RIGHT NOW mainly just makes Dems sound like sore losers. If the results had gone the opposite way (Clinton wins EC, Trump wins popular vote), I'm sure we'd have heard the same rhetoric from the other side, and Dems would be extolling the virtues of our Founders in choosing a system that would overturn a popular vote against someone like Trump.
The problem is that none of this will change unless we start getting people on BOTH SIDES to agree to change the system. That's not really a discussion anybody can have now rationally. Maybe in a year or two. Maybe if Trump's presidency implodes to the point Republicans also wish the results had been overturned.
Right now, I think most of this talk is just further alienating the Trump supporters who already felt so alienated by liberals that they voted in desperation for someone like Trump.
when an outsider challenged her they cheated and undercut him in any way they could
This is totally untrue. Sanders completely failed to win over the people of color who are the base of the party, so he lost. Those are real thinking American citizens, and their votes matter just as much as anybody else's. Thanks mostly to that, Sanders was effectively out of contention after the primaries on April 19th. He would have had to win almost every delegate after that, and that was just not going to happen, short of the mythical "in bed with dead hooker or live boy" situation.
The Emails Russian intelligence stole from the DNC servers they hacked were all authored after that date. The DNC, like the RNC, is a nearly powerless organization, so even if they had wanted to "steal" anything they couldn't, and it was far to late to do so at that date.
This whole "Sanders got robbed" narrative is a complete fabrication. If anything here is responsible for the way the election went, its that his voters bought into hook-line-and-sinker when Trump and the Russians started pushing it.
Which I guess gets us back onto the topic of lies masquerading as factual news...
Radical Islamic Terror in the US is very rare - even if we include the outlier of 9-11.
Meanwhile, an anti-Semite has been appointed to Chief Strategist and hate crimes are on the rise. As a Jew, do you really think I should be more afraid of Muslims than of someone who hates Jews whispering in the President's ear?
There have been some 100 Jihad attacks in the US since 9/11- it's not all that rare. Overall, there have been something like 30k Jihad attacks worldwide since 9/11.
Crowd-source fact checking. Like!, Share!, True!, and Untrue! buttons. Remember the "CITATION NEEDED" button? Put a truth rating right next to how many likes, and shares each story gets.
Put the onus on the user, then those believing such far fetched stories have nobody to blame but themselves. Anything less is not enough, and anything more is censorship with big (I'll tell you, I mean 'UGE) abuse potential.
As a bonus, this teaches the masses critical thinking, and how to debunk garbage (and discover truth) all by themselves!
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
That the Republicans then talked of further delaying for the next 4 years should Clinton win sends an even more ominous message that they care more about politics than the Constitution, the Country and *all* of its people.
Where in the Constitution does it say there must be 9 supreme court justices? Will you complain if Trump nominates us up to 11 justices and congress doesn't blanket approve his choices?
You're quite right.
Racism on the part of BLM and similar groups, and the Democrats who support them, turned off many voters to Clinton and the Democrats including many lifelong Democrat voters.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Just because she got 2.5million more votes than Trump in California is not enough to use the popular vote as some sort of vindication.
Yeah, who cares if more people voted for her? That's not how Democracy is supposed to work!
Funny how folks don't mind if a system is "rigged" if the rigging is done so that their sides wins.
Because everyone knows that the citizens of some states are more important than others.
And it's not the "small states" that win out either in the electoral college, like its advocates tell us.
Alaska didn't have much vote. Wyoming and Montana and Hawaii weren't the states that mattered.
It's the "battleground" states that are the deciders in the electoral college system. Pennsylvania. Florida. Ohio. Trump focused every ounce of attention in four key states that barely swung his way on election day.
I just think it would be a bit more democratic, and politicians would have to listen to a wider spectrum of voters, if it was just as important to campaign in California and Texas as it was in Ohio, Iowa, and Florida.
This is exactly why the electors should overturn the vote and pick Clinton.
Because they're working in the system we have, not one based on the vote of the people. It's their job not to allow the ignorant electorate to cast our country off a cliff.
This was one of the major points of the electoral college -- to be the check on a particular stupid move of the people. Since it was originally put into place, the expectations changed, that an electoral voter must always vote along the lines that the people he was voting for voted. Eventually the derogatory "faithless voter" label was added to the electoral voters that didn't follow constituent voting, but the electoral college doesn't make a lot of sense if that can't happen.
The article sounds like they were trying to avoid bias, not backlash.
The GOP has plenty of issues without anyone needing to make more for them.
They are trying to avoid APPEARING biased.
If you know anything about Zuckerburg at all, it will be clear the goal is not facts or truth. Never was, never will be.
There is going to be a long, slow, and huge backlash against the media and their leftist lies. Z-dog is just trying to avoid getting caught up in it. (He will fail.)
Still butthurt you little bitch? Pick a better candidate next time.
Pot, meet Kette..
Leans into mike...
Wrong
We all lost. Let's not pretend that we had a good candidate and a bad candidate to choose from in the last election. We had the TWO WORST candidates for President in my lifetime. What are the chances of that actually happening? If either one of them had been halfway passable, they should have been able to beat the pants (or pants-suit) off of the other, since each was so bad. What a fucking disaster of an election, but I made my peace with this horrible outcome six months ago. There was no winning here.
Private college students
Seems to me that it's usually the public college students that protest, and most public college students live a fairly meager existence.
Bannon's not an anti-semite. And what's on the rise is leftist rioters beating people and setting fires in the street
Hint: the rioters don't give a shit about whether Hillary lost either. They're professional anarchists who are attracted to large crowds and use cover of the crowds to enable their violence. They're the same folks who broke things in the G8 and Seattle WTO summits. The police and the protest organizers report that outsides come in armed with weapons and covered head to toe, but there's not a lot that can be done about them when there are so many people about.
Yeah, I'm sure Donald is gonna promote antisemitism and encourage hatred against his own family.
Who knows. The man seems to act on a whim and he has no moral compass.
That's one of the things that blows my mind. There are a lot of people in the U.S. who basically said, "I'm sick of all you billionaire New York atheists controlling my life! You're out of touch with the working man, and don't care about me!" and then proceeded to elect Trump. It's like an Onion article.
That the Republicans then talked of further delaying for the next 4 years should Clinton win sends an even more ominous message that they care more about politics than the Constitution, the Country and *all* of its people.
Where in the Constitution does it say there must be 9 supreme court justices?
Will you complain if Trump nominates us up to 11 justices and congress doesn't blanket approve his choices?
Never said otherwise, but there's a fairly long history of having 9 (since 1869) and certainly an odd number is more productive than an even number. It still holds that the Republican's actions on this are simply and purely partisan, not altruistic. As far as the actual number, this was/is actually set by Congress. From Why Are There 9 Supreme Court Justices?
The original U.S. Constitution did not set the number of justices on the Supreme Court. Therefore, it was up to Congress to decide, and in 1801, it set the number at five. But things didn’t stay that way for long.
"The number of Supreme Court justices has changed over the years," Kathy Arberg, spokesperson for the U.S. Supreme Court, told Life's Little Mysteries. "The number of justices has been as high as ten.”
Congress increased the number to seven in 1807, to nine in 1837, then to 10 in 1863.
Then, in order to prevent President Andrew Johnson, who was soon to be impeached, from naming any new Supreme Court justices, Congress passed the Judicial Circuits Act of 1866. This Act reduced the number from 10 to seven. The decrease was to take effect as the seats became vacant.
However, only two seats were freed up by 1869, so there were eight justices. Congress added one seat back in, and decided that there should be nine justices. The Judiciary Act of 1869 officially set the number, and it has not budged since.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"But ________ is worse!"
and
"Don't waste your vote"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
In big cities, you accept criminal activity as "normal". Which explains how big city liberals can vote for Clinton.
Or, as I say ... Hillary is the only other candidate who could lose to Trump.
Yes, she was that bad, and liberals can't fathom why she lost.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
In the 1950's, children didn't riot when they lost. IT might actually be a better time.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Or both: a bug that's indistinguishable from a feature or used as a feature.
And I think we should cut politicians some slack: the world is changing and they don't know how to deal with change. A lot of countries are stumped.
Perhaps they should be called out for not being honest about not knowing how to deal with the change. Here is an example what I think would be an honest response to Trump's alleged job solutions:
"I'll be honest, technology is changing the world so fast that we politicians and economists are not fully sure how to deal it yet. We don't have all the answers."
"But we do have a best guess to solutions, and this includes better education and retraining for new kinds of jobs. Mr. Trump is tying to turn back the clock by putting up walls and barriers to keep foreign competition out."
"He also wants to re-negotiate trade deals. If he succeeds, and that's a big IF, if may postpone the inevitable, but is not addressing the core problem."
"Detroit makes about the same amount cars it did a few decades. However, fewer workers are needed to make that same amount. Automation is the real culprit, NOT trade deals. China itself may face the same problem soon as robots and automation grow better over time and are competitive with low wages."
"Our plan is to help people move into new fields not affected by these forces. And for those who have difficulty making the transition, providing a safety net so that they and their families have food, shelter, and healthcare."
"Our vision is forward-looking, not backward looking. We cannot put the technology genie back in the bottle, but must adjust with it. Donald Trump does not have God-like powers to reverse time."
"Thank You, and God Bless America!" (cue clapping)
Table-ized A.I.
Vindication? Clinton has a pretty significant popular vote lead, likely ending up at more than 2 million. In pretty much any other electoral system in the world, that would have been sufficient to grant the win to Hilary.
But no, we have the electoral college. And the reason it exists is explicitly because of slavery: the southern slave-owners wanted to ensure that their disallowing their slaves to vote wouldn't prevent them from winning the presidency. This was the foundation of the 3/5ths compromise, and the electoral college was the mechanism that was created so that the 3/5ths compromise could operate for both presidential elections as well as House elections.
Donald Trump is a flagrantly racist candidate who won because of racist institutions set up by racists in our distant past.
Except that Clinton has been cleared of all wrongdoing, and none of her scandals have been shown to be anything more substantive than innuendo.
By contrast, Trump has multiple legal cases that seem to be quite substantive, such as regarding his Trump University, and his mismanagement of funds from the Trump Foundation.
The news media spent huge amounts of time discussing the innuendo around Clinton, but barely any talking about Trump's much more substantive legal problems. No, these two candidates are not and never were in the same realm of bad behavior. But the media has pretended that they are, even sometimes to the point of indicating that Clinton had much worse issues of corruption (which is patently absurd to anybody that has actually paid attention to the evidence).
"But ________ is worse!"
and
"Don't waste your vote"
Fuck, there wasn't a more ideal year for the ascension of a third-party candidate.
Unfortunately both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were entirely incompetent.
I just chose a write-in candidate.
I think the whole idea that Hispanics (they're Caucasians ferchrissake and descendants of Spaniards or Portuguese) aren't white is ridiculous. That not only makes Spaniards and Portuguese and probably also Italians people of colour (whoda thunk?), but also me every time I go to the beach and get a fucking tan. It also would mean that slave trade and all the shit SJWs accuse the white man of perpetrating was actually done mostly by people of colour. Now which is it, can't tell me that descendants of Spaniards turn into POC simply by being born in a different continent. It can't be the tan alone, right?
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Oh we've heard loads about Trump. Trump university, lawsuits, bankruptcies. A rape accusation that blew up on the people pushing it. What we heard about Clinton was that she had classified material on a private server, knew some of it was classified, should have know more of it was, mixed private business with state department business, deleted e-mails that were supposed to be turned over and had people with no security classification handling the server and classified e-mails. It's fact, the video where this was reported to Congress has been rerun endlessly. The reason they didn't indict was "She never intended to break the law." Try that defense sometime when you get busted. Let me know how that works out for ya. There was more stuff dealing with the charity that isn't a charity but that's actually yet to be investigated fully. Given that she's apparently above the law though I imagine they'll say she broke the law there but she didn't mean to. Bernie was honest at least. Socialist to the core but honest about that too unlike most of the Democrats who say they aren't socialists but obviously are. I might have voted for Bernie over Trump even though I oppose his socialist policies. Given that Congress is Republican though that stuff wouldn't have gone anywhere so I'd have felt pretty safe voting for him. The Democrats though made up their mind they wanted Hilliary. As bad as Trump is I had to take him over that. Hell, he might turn out okay in the end. You can never tell for sure with him.
I find it funny that all those black voters that turned out so fervently to help her defeat Sanders didn't show up to help her defeat Trump. What's Newsweek's explanation for that?
Hillary supports think she should walk into the Supreme Court and sue the US. Good luck try explaining to liberals sovereign immunity https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The fact that we have a lot to account for doesn't mean there aren't other factors. Voter suppression worked. The voter ID laws discouraged a lot of people from voting even if they actually didn't have to show ID. And social media did play a part. Facebook especially has been flooded with political posts that are false or misleading. It's impossible to challenge so much misinformation.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Universal health care, taxing for social programs, reducing military spending.. is that so wrong?
Sure we have a long way to go to make all of those efficient and legitimate but it would be much easier if we didn't have one half of the political spectrum simply existing to undo what the other side does.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
They didn't "turn out fervently" in the primaries either. But the ones who did nearly all voted for Clinton.
The problem is that in some states (particularly in the South) nearly all Democratic voters in the state are minority. Sanders not appealing to those voters meant Clinton took just about every single delegate in those states. Since the Democratic delegate selection process is not winner-take-all, and they were effectively splitting the white vote, this represented an insurmountable lead. It was all over but the shouting (and my there was a lot of that) by mid April.
... It also would mean that slave trade and all the shit SJWs accuse the white man of perpetrating was actually done mostly by people of colour.
Well ... not to be pedantic, but quite a lot of the slave trade WAS in fact perpetrated by "people of colour" (Primarily on the initial Capture and Supply side though, at least as far as Slavery within the U.S.).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
... According to John K. Thornton, Europeans usually bought enslaved people who were captured in endemic warfare between African states.[22] Some Africans had made a business out of capturing Africans from neighboring ethnic groups or war captives and selling them.[23] A reminder of this practice is documented in the Slave Trade Debates of England in the early 19th century: "All the old writers... concur in stating not only that wars are entered into for the sole purpose of making slaves, but that they are fomented by Europeans, with a view to that object."[24] People living around the Niger River were transported from these markets to the coast and sold at European trading ports in exchange for muskets and manufactured goods such as cloth or alcohol.[25] However, the European demand for slaves provided a large new market for the already existing trade.[26] While those held in slavery in their own region of Africa might hope to escape, those shipped away had little chance of returning to Africa.
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"Love the fact that small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!" - @realDonaldTrump
For a man that "acts on a whim" or that "has no moral compass" this sure seems like an odd to tweet. Or maybe you could be wrong and the medias portrayal of the Fifth Reich rising were grossly overstated and hyperbolic?
I forget, was that a day after he tweeted the exact opposite sentiments? Oh, right, it was.
As a party we've built a big umbrella. Somehow the one group we failed to bring in was the straight white male.
Somehow? The only unifying tenet of the left that I can see is hatred of the straight white male. That seems to be a turn-off for a larger group of voters than the unpeople.
I think the rest of the list is correct, but fundamentally missing the biggest point. Just like Brexit, this election was a referendum on immigration. That's the mystery of #5 too, BTW. The disconnect between the powers-that-were and people facing economic hardship about immigration is so bad that people were even willing to vote for Trump, just for a chance someone would listen. Same thing is happening across Europe. You dismiss people as racists because they want less immigration, you get Trump, Brexit, all all the growing nationalism across Europe.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Buzzfeed; the ultimate arbiter of which political side of the aisle is more biased.
If you read Federalist Paper 68, you'll find that Publius said the Electoral College was very much to make sure that someone like Trump would not be elected.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That's one of the things that blows my mind. There are a lot of people in the U.S. who basically said, "I'm sick of all you billionaire New York atheists controlling my life! You're out of touch with the working man, and don't care about me!" and then proceeded to elect Trump. It's like an Onion article.
Sort of funny that they managed to keep one corrupt, elitist New York Democrat out of office by voting in another corrupt, elitist New York Democrat.
Good point. I preferred the seemingly not corrupt and not elitist candidate from New York, but somehow he didn't make it that far.
That may have been a reason that some put forward, but it doesn't have much to do with the arguments among politicians that were happening at the time. See here for a more in-depth analysis. Without slavery, I sincerely doubt the electoral college would have won out over a simple direct election.
Thanks - bookmarked that page for use in later arguments.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
During the primaries, I pointed out that people were upset with slimy politicians quo enough that both parties were being overrun by non-party members in their primaries. Of course, the Republicans got rid of the politician part and the Democrats got rid of the slimy part.
Battle ground states change over time.
But the problem remains the same -- you get to focus your attention on a small section of the country and ignore the rest.
Why are highly partisan comments from an Icelandic SJW who lives entirely within the "progressive" echo chamber all sitting at +5? This reeks of sockpuppet upvoting.
Because people should moderate the content, not the person. The content was informative. The person, I don't give a shit whether he's an AC, SuperTroll, or InformativePosterOfTheYear (well I would care, but not for moderating purposes).
Moderators, for instance, should never follow a person around and just downvote anything he does. Moderators should not have axes to grind against any person. They do, but they shouldn't.