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Facebook Says 126 Million Americans May Have Seen Russia-Linked Political Posts (reuters.com)
Facebook said on Monday that Russia-based operatives published about 80,000 posts on the social network over a two-year period in an effort to sway U.S. politics and that about 126 million Americans may have seen the posts during that time. Reuters reports: Facebook's latest data on the Russia-linked posts - possibly reaching around half of the U.S. population of voting age - far exceeds the company's previous disclosures. It was included in written testimony provided to U.S. lawmakers, and seen by Reuters, ahead of key hearings with social media and technology companies about Russian meddling in elections on Capitol Hill this week. Twitter separately has found 2,752 accounts linked to Russian operatives, a source familiar with the company's written testimony said. That estimate is up from a tally of 201 accounts that Twitter reported in September. Google, owned by Alphabet, said in a statement on Monday it had found $4,700 in Russia-linked ad spending during the 2016 U.S. election cycle, and that it would build a database of election ads. Facebook's general counsel, Colin Stretch, said in the written testimony that the 80,000 posts from Russia's Internet Research Agency were a tiny fraction of content on Facebook, equal to one out of 23,000 posts.
You voted for trump, because you're an easily-bamboozled ass wipe.
That may or may not be your fault. I mean, it could be your parents' fault for all we know. After all the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
This two party system is a problem with all the money is funneled into 2 people. WTF, All that money into 2 parties. When vary widely on so many issues, 2 parties don't cover everyone. I have no idea how.
The answer is quite simple. The long term equilibrium configuration of an elected government where the winner takes all in a single round of voting, regardless of percentage, and winning is determined by the "first past the post" method. is a two party system. This can be proven mathematically and those interested in the details will find many fine sources with a few searches.
but wish we had a multiparty system to stop this "us vs them" tribal cultural war.
That will not be possible without major changes to the US constitution to implement proportional representation, where seats are allocated by votes and representatives of any party that gets enough votes for at least one seat will be granted that seat with more seats going proportionately to parties with more votes. Although it's still possible for a single party to win an outright majority in such a parliamentary system, in practice that rarely happens and it's not the equilibrium state in any case. The more typical situation is for the party with the most seats to "form a government" by making deals with other parties to secure votes for a prime minister from the majority party with other parties in the coalition receiving other benefits, typically ministerial level seats.
We got Democrats voting Republican for financial issues, and Republicans voting democrat for social issues. Libertarians, Socialist, Communists, etc, its a clusterfuck.
A parliamentary system would better harmonize and accommodate the various nuances of these positions. Unfortunately, that's not the system that we have here in the United States, mostly for historical reasons. You see, when the United States was founded there hadn't really been a democratic republic on any serious scale for thousands of years. Oh sure, you had city states here and there but nothing like a federal republic system. The most common form of government at the time was monarchy with varying degrees of absolutism and sometimes accompanied by an assembly of noblemen and (nominally) selected commoners but with much practical power remaining in the hands of the monarch. Many aristocratic people in Europe and elsewhere thought that democracy could not work on such a large scale and that United States was doomed to fail. Being that we were first nation to give Democracy a serious try on a large scale in a long while, basically since the early Republican period of the Romans, we were bound to get some things not quite right and those mistakes are now more or less baked into the system now 241 years on.
.the US Constitution supports only two.
Where does it say this in the constitution? There are over 20 parties listed on national elections and a few people in the federal government who belong to neither of the two major parties.
The problem actually stems from our system of government electing representatives for a specific district (or state). It results in a bunch of winner-take-all elections. The founding fathers chose this method because they wanted elected representatives to have a direct connection to the people they were representing. The downside is that a vote for someone who has no chance of winning (a third party candidate) is a wasted vote.
In countries which use parliamentary elections, everyone casts their votes, and the members of parliament are allocated in proportion to the vote. So a vote for a third party is not "wasted" (as long as that party gets enough votes to obtain one seat). The downside of course is that no single member of parliament feels bound to a particular group of people or represents any particular region.
If you wish to retain the representative model while having fairer outcomes, you first have to realize that there is no such thing as a perfectly fair election system. All of them can result in counter-intuitive results where the "winner" doesn't really enjoy as much support among the voters as the loser(s). People are upset about the Electoral College "stealing" the election from Clinton. But if you add up the votes for all the parties and independent candidates, the liberal parties (Democrat, Green, Independent, Socialism and Liberalism, Bernie Sanders) add up to 49.38% of the votes. Adding up the conservative parties (Republican, Libertarian, Constitution, Evan McMullin) gives 50.06%. So the correct winner of the 2016 election was in fact a conservative candidate even if you ignored the Electoral College and did a straight vote tally.
But different systems result in a different frequency of counter-intuitive results. Unfortunately the plurality wins system the U.S. uses is one of the worst. The frequency of "bad" results can be minimized by use of an instant-runoff voting system. Where each voter ranks all the candidates in order of preference. You then successively eliminate the candidate with the lowest number of #1 votes. Voters who voted for that candidate have their vote reallocated to their next highest choice of the remaining candidates. And so on. Until just two candidates are left, and the more popular of them among all the voters is the winner.
Maybe you've never heard how effective propaganda can be.
Here is a hint. If it didn't work, no one would waste their time doing it...
> Really. Is it that hard?
No, it's not. There are some examples out there. So if you're asking for information, here you go:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1...
http://www.philly.com/philly/n...
What is that hard though, is to understand why your comment got modded insightful.
If you're demanding no less than the full set of ads involved: it's natural to expect the tech firms involved would hold back, because the whole thing is very embarrassing for them.
> and certainly not any journalist's outright lies about this
Aha, herein lies a big part of the problem. Trump has convinced you that "the media" is the enemy, it's all fake news. That is one of the steps that autocrats take, to discredit a free and open press, to remove one of the points of accountability on them.
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things