The article starts off stating that Hillary Clinton was the choice of nearly every newspaper editorial review board, and that despite those endorsements it didn't matter. Does anyone else find this incredibly tone deaf, particularly after last night's results?
To be clear, I did not vote for Trump, but my rejection of his candidacy was certainly not based on the stance of the LA Times editorial board. To be honest, with the amount of biased and sloppy journalism I read from even the venerated newspapers like the LA and NY Times, I'm not sure why the author assumes anyone should listen to the suggestions of their respective editorial boards.
Because newspaper endorsement used to have more weight. I am not sure it has ever been measured scientifically but it was at least perceived as having some weight.
Now today, we realize that it has no effect on the average voter.
This is a shocking realization if your are a journalist working for a newspaper. It is a "Emperor's New Clothes" moment. For the rest of us, I would say this has less an impact.
Eh. I think you don't even need to read the endorsements to understand that the NYTimes and WaPo were both heavily pro-Clinton. Chances are if you were anti-Clinton, you'd be reading their articles throughout the election with a grain of salt.
The funny thing is once the election was over, suddenly a slew of articles came from WaPo talking about how Bernie may have had gotten short changed from the primaries and how they may have affected the election, be it preventing him from facing Trump or dividing the Democratic voter base. Like, only NOW does this newspapers care about Bernie. A lot of supporters for Sanders won't forget the treatment he got from the Washington Post.
Plus, in the case of Trump, his anti-establishment rhetoric may have meant it worked in his favor to not get endorsements from the media elite.
The editorial page of the NY Times was heavily pro-Clinton (and anti-Trump). The news side was just straight-ahead, aggressive journalism, IMHO. As examples, they broke the story about Clinton's email server, which arguably was the biggest blow to her campaign, and had continual reports from the Wikileaks/Russian DNC release.
(I thought reporting the latter was over-aggressive. It was anonymous, uncorroborated data from arguably the most dubious possible source, Russian intelligence.)
In traditional news organizations, editorial boards and newsrooms operate independently of each other and it's unfortunate when high quality reporting is too often dismissed with a quick "meh, it's a liberal|conservative rag that can't be trusted." The "editorialization" by the modern blog-o-sphere has wrecked havoc on the landscape and sewed the seeds of distrust. I don't think there is any doubt of that.
* Fox News and other Fox/Murdoch publications world wide claim to be traditional news organizations, but really are editorializing. Ironically, this undermines the reputation of real news organizations - people assume they do the same.
* Many on the right now value ideology over fact. Information that fits the ideology is accepted; inconvenient fact is not. Climate change, Obama's citizenship (doubted by 40% of Republicans, IIRC), and Saddam Hussein's possession of WMD are simple examples.
* The demonization of any information that doesn't fit the ideology has resulted in the right continually demonizing real news organizations, who report based on fact and not ideology.
I'm not writing that to be partisan. There is a critical problem on the right that is destroying society, democracy and civilization, and an attitude that they are not stewards of those things - as if there is no consequence. If it was happening also on the left then I'd say the same, but it's not.
The surprising thing isn't that the NY Times's endorsement didn't matter, but that the endorsements of conservative newspapers didn't matter. Many of them came out against Trump too.
I'd point to the uptick in online sources like InfoWars and Breitbart and Drudge as a sign of where people are getting their news. It's rare to see any of them link to more traditional outlets.
It's rare to see any of them link to more traditional outlets.
Which suggests you don't read either of the latter, for they do that all the time. Just go to Drudge right now and see the links at the top left to the NYT, LA Times, the U.K. Metro which I just learned about yesterday as an example of the MSM over there (haven't looked at it yet), The Hill (founded 1994 and pretty "traditional" nowadays), CNET (founded in 1994 as well), the Daily Mail, and ABC and CBS News. This is Drudge's daily bread and butter.
And for now, just take my word for it that Breitbart not only publishes a lot of AP, AFP etc. new wire stories straight, a lot of their items are short sections of traditional outlets with some commentary, links to them and encouragement to read the whole thing.
Or that the people who read them don't have an above average influence on others who look to them for a more informed take on current events and the like.
>Because newspaper endorsement used to have more weight.
Newspapers also used to be local organs, owned by the local upper class, staffed with the local working class, covering news that people could check against their lived experience.
Nowadays newspapers are heavily nationalized and internationalized, owned by media conglomerates, and staffed with the kind of upper-class white-collar professionals who could afford many years of unpaid internships before getting a paid job. The information printed may even be veridical, but it's often not checkably veridical, so it gets down-weighted and mixed in with all the other uncheckable shit you read on the internet.
I don't think it is tone deaf. It is a very valid point. People that working politics and research it as their job heavily recommended one candidate over the other. It is getting easier to ignore the opinion of an expert and instead find a source that agrees with how you feel. People are looking for reasons to discredit sources that they don't agree with. Sloppiness and bias will always happen, but at some point you have to realize that a source like The Wall Street Journal is better than Brietbart and that blog posts and opinion pieces should not be given the same weight as investigative journalism.
As an aside, while the WSJ may have some credibility it's not that far away ideologically from Bretibart. In particular I was reading an article there recently about the Wells Fargo scandal and despite it not being an editorial the entire article was essentially a defense piece for the executives. By no measure was it even an attempt at even-handed journalism, it was straight-up advocacy masquerading as news.
In theory I would like to agree with you that it is indeed a good idea to take the opinions of experts in to consideration when deciding on such complex issues. I suppose my disagreement lies in whether I can really consider many of these people experts when it comes to the motivations of poor rural white voters. The US in an enormous country and I think we are far more geographically, economically, and culturally segregated than we like to admit. Based on what I've read and heard from journalists in the week prior to, and even more so after the election, and I admit that I may well be wrong in my perception of the situation, I don't get the feeling that these journalists have any meaningful insight into the experiences of poor rural workers. This seems to be a growing problem where two very different populations, the rural working class and the more cosmopolitan urban dwellers, have very little interaction with one another. I think it can be very difficult to empathize with those you don't understand, and certainly very easy to demonize those for the same reason.
I can see how rural America might not connect with sources like the Washington Post and the New York times, but there were also recommendations from publications like Birmingham News and Falls Church News-Press. The local papers are more likely to understand their lives. The people going to the internet may actually be doing the opposite by taking in recommendations from national political sites rather than local editorial boards.
I also agree with how populations don't interact with each other, but it may be even worse than you describe. Even in urban areas, those in the suburbs seem to be more disconnected with those in the inner city.
To be honest I think the wailing and caterwauling by establishment mouthpieces (NYTimes, WSJ firmly fall in this camp) probably only cemented the resolve of the average Trump voter.
They're very well aware that their interests and the interests of the owners of the NYTimes and the WSJ are diametrically opposed.
> heavily recommended one candidate over the other.
I think a big question about that is why they recommended one over the other. There's a lot of distrust of those recommendations, and speculation that they are recommending the candidate that helps their own demographic, rather than the US at large.
The tone is that a racist demagogue who made up lies off the top of his head at every speech was found acceptable by (almost) a plurality of voters.
The tone is that voters have been proven to be manipulable through fear to blame people of other races and nationalities for whatever economic conditions are unfavorable to them. The tone is that the truth and nuance of these issues are now irrelevant in elections.
The tone is that serial bullying and abuse of women is not a disqualifier for what should be the most-respected office in the nation.
Newspaper editorial staffs are not to be shamed for being disgusted by it. But yeah, there's no more denying the extent to which that tone exists now.
> The tone is that a racist demagogue who made up lies off the top of his head at every speech was found acceptable by (almost) a plurality of voters.
The alternative was what? A corrupt rich white woman who has been involved in politics since the 1970s, who has been behind the curve of history at almost every step (saying stuff like blacks are superpredators and video games caused Columbine and not getting behind gay marriage until a couple years ago).
> The tone is that voters have been proven to be manipulable through fear to blame people of other races and nationalities for whatever economic conditions are unfavorable to them. The tone is that the truth and nuance of these issues are now irrelevant in elections.
This has always happened. Why is it that when poor minorities vote for their economic well-being it is seen as progress but when poor white people do it it's seen as racism?
> The tone is that serial bullying and abuse of women is not a disqualifier for what should be the most-respected office in the nation.
Bill Clinton.
Your concerns are heard, but they'd be a lot more believable if the person who didn't get elected was not the face of hypocrisy.
I didn't vote for Trump. I just don't think simplifying an election about the economy into something about race or bigotry is acceptable. It's dishonest.
The working class has been gutted for years because of neoconservative and neoliberal views. Surprise - the class of people most rejected who receive poor educations and don't have a window into the modern economy have some unfavorable views on some issues.
This is the biggest irony of the article. Everyone in the establishment media is trying to figure out how Trump won without their endorsement without addressing the actual issues voters cared about. It even says in this article that people suspect that the media is biased and consolidated, implies that it's actually objective and fact checking, while also acknowledging that every editorial board supported Clinton and implied that the only reason someone would vote for Trump is racism and sexism. It questions whether Facebook is too powerful while acknowledging that the actual source of information on Facebook is people's peers. What it's really questioning is whether people are too empowered to talk to each other rather than listening to authoritative sources.
Michael Moore is the liberal source that I've seen most quoted by Trump supporters. He says the reason people voted for Trump is that they are sick of a neoliberal agenda which focuses on intervention in foreign wars and Free Trade agreements which seem to be little more than corporate protectionism. They're sick of policies which have been proven to increase wealth inequality rather than enrich lower and middle class workers. They're sick of economic uncertainty in a time of unprecedented productivity. Newspapers gloss over this and focus on racial conflict, which is a real problem that needs to be addressed, but it's not the whole story, and editorial boards which generally agree with neoliberalism are unwilling to question it with any depth.
The reason many people, including myself, look to xenophobia as one of the driving forces in the election is because I'm fairly certain Donald Trump would struggle to place somewhere like Belgium on the map and likely can't list the countries that border Syria.
He is so grossly unqualified for the position that it is difficult for me to understand what other reason someone would chose to vote for him.
Clinton was a poor choice for sure but Trump doesn't even pass the phone screen of the basic necessary knowledge for the position.
Edit: I should clarify that the point of my comment is not to reopen the debate about Trump as opposed to give some context as to why many people look to those specific issues as a driver of his election.
Huh, so obviously highschool students and college students who can't place countries on a map can't do so because they are xenophobes. That's a very interesting conclusion to make.
I would hope you wouldn't elect a high school student to be President of the United States. I would also hope that knowledge of basic geography of important regions in the world would be a prerequisite for a position that largely deals with foreign affairs.
If we completely ignore basic competency, then I must conclude his rhetoric, which largely revolved around scapegoating immigrants and the people of foreign nations, played a large part in the decision.
Edit: Again, this is intended to give context as to why some, including myself, look to those issues as a driving force in the election.
It is not actually about what they report. It is all about what they don't report. Left wing and right wing propaganda are not the same. Right wing propaganda tells you what you must believe. Left wing propaganda simply leaves out the truth. Either way you have distortion but the methods are very different. NPR is not better than Fox News. Once you realize this, thou shalt be enlightened.
Let's take the case of Islam.
The working class is more religious than the middle class. The middle class mostly treat religion as a weird weekend hobby and don't really think the believers are serious. Deep down they think, these people are not being serious.
Well, I came out of a cult, do not believe in a personal God, and I can tell you these people really do believe in their thing. Belief is real, even if I disagree with it.
So when the working class look to Islam, they see religion and when the middle class look to Islam, they see politics. They simply leave out the religion itself. It is not about right and wrong, it is just that they are seeing different portions of the elephant. When a journalist is captured by ISIS he thinks he might get out alive by a ransom or prisoner trade. The working class understand he'll die because he is a kaffir. Do you see?
This explains the bifurcation between working and middle class perspectives. The worldview of the middleclass has no value at the resolution of the working class. I think George Orwell was one of the few middle class journalists who truly understood his people.
With the possible exception of Julian Assange, there are few working class journalists in the mainstream press, not even at Breitbart.
If you're honest, you have to ask yourself this question:
Which is the more likely?
That journalists were in a bubble? Or the entire working class? Look at the map of voting results by distinct. It is an ocean of red.
I see you deleted your initial response (I have cached replies that enables me to see posts that were deleted), which is fine, but I wanted to respond to three of your queries. To respect your deletion I won't quote from it.
1. Here I am using the colloquial meaning of the word propaganda, which is ideologically biased information, usually it takes the truth but then stretches it to breaking point and beyond.
2. I do not possess a Facebook account. I don't even have a mobile phone. I don't watch Fox News in case you were curious. I hardly watch any television at all since I don't have one. Many readers of Hacker News do not have them, it's a common demographic in geek circles.
3. Class warfare is a real thing. It is not an extreme concept, it's a descriptor. Europeans like me frequently complain that Americans don't grok class or that Americans conflate 'race' with 'class'. You don't have to agree of course. Perhaps America is the one nation on the planet that didn't gradually evolve a class system as it matured ;-)
Humour aside, I do think this (gradually evolve a class system as it matured) is one of the major reasons why many American intellectuals are increasingly interested in old European ideas and books from the 18/19th centuries. Their resonance is much deeper than it used to be.
I just deleted it because honestly, it's not like I'm going to get a real answer anyway. You continue to group people into baskets. Now it's "Americans" and "Fox News", race and class. I was just trying to understand where that comes from. Someday I truly hope to get some better insight as to where the general extremism is coming from. The reality is it's not going to happen in this thread so I was better off just deleting it as opposed to cluttering the discussion for no real benefit.
I think the answer you seek is in front of you. Look at it this way hiou.
There are the Lumpers (everything is the same) and the Splitters (everything is different). If you remember the book Sophie's World (which was full of great insights into this), then it is like the genres of reductionism and holism in philosophy.
The real answer is that people's brains work differently.
If you want some consolation, it is that we cannot live without either group, Lumper or Splitter. Each group has failure modes which can be corrected by the other tribe. I am convinced that is why the left and right exist in all cultures and times. It's a very important human algorithm.
Don't watch or read Fox News, don't believe anything in email chains and don't do Facebook really. I get this information by collecting large amounts of information from various sources. I see the ridiculous things that the Sally Kohn's of this world do to try to equivocate what happened with the Orlando massacre to the general Christian opposition to gay marriage. When leftists try to compare people having and voicing an opinion to the actual murder of fellow citizens, we have a problem.
A big real estate New York businessmen / reality TV star (certainly of the New York "establishment" for decades) entered the Republican primaries. Donald Trump was a nobody. Then, he started talking about walls around Mexico and banning all Muslims. This made him very popular in many places. This ended up carrying him all the way to the presidency.
That is a reason why there's so much talk about this. It's a mistake to think that this is election was just economics. A lot of Trump's support came from very well off people after all.
Having said that I do agree with you a fair bit. For a start, "racist" is a bad term. That implies outright hatred, which in my viewpoint is very minority; "cultural anxiety" is a better phrase to me, future insecurity compounded by tribal instinct. EG: It's not "I hate Mexican people", it's "Mexican people took my jobs". Those two sentences are not equivalent.
This too is not the only reason people supported Trump either (anything from nostalgia to agreement with policies to Hillary hatred played a role). On the flip side Bernie Sanders showed that non-culturally-anxious economics played well with many Trump voters too.
But that initial data point still is troubling to me. And it's less on the people that voted for him and more on the candidate himself. Trump was able to exploit this, and in the process made current culture a lot more toxic.
It's a bit tricky, I agree. Like with most of his positions.
During the campaign he said that he's against the supreme court ruling since it should be decided by the state. He also said in an interview that he is for "traditional marriage".
It could be worse, except that he has a VP who is a huge opponent of LGBT rights.
Trump has publicly said he will appoint judges who will overturn Roe v Wade. I expect that if he goes through with that gay marriage will also be attacked.
They will certainly be attacked but unless conservatives get a sixth seat in the court, they are unlikely to succeed. Justices are political appointees so there is some selection for values at play but they take their jobs seriously and vote across partisan lines much more often than our politicians.
Justice Kennedy, the conservative swing vote, has been supportive of restrictions on abortion but he has explicitly said that he prefers to defend the precedent Roe v Wade set. He even wrote the majority opinion in support of marriage equality. Even in controversial decisions like Citizens United where I vehemently disagree with him, I have to admit that he seems like a dedicated constitutional scholar that believes in preserving the integrity of the institution of the Supreme Court and the US constitution. His opinions are well thought out, are based on a balanced view of strict and loose interpretation of the constitution, and he takes his role as a bipartisan seriously so I think we still have a reliable firewall in the court.
But you have to ask yourself whether any other Republican candidate would have an open homosexual (Thiel) on the stage at the RNC and whether they'd be caught dead doing this:
As a politician seeking election, he said various conflicting things. You can read into this what you want, but I certainly wouldn't consider it strong support for marriage equality:
WALLACE: But, Mr. Trump, let's take one issue. You say now that the Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriage is the law of the land and that any politician who talks about wanting to amend the Constitution is just playing politics. Are you saying it's time to move on?
TRUMP: No, I'm saying this. It has been ruled up. It has been there. If I'm a, you know, if I'm elected, I would be very strong on putting certain judges on the bench that I think maybe could change things.
But they've got a long way to go. I mean at some point, we have to get back down to business. But there’s no question about it. I mean most -- and most people feel this way.
They have ruled on it. I wish that it was done by the state. I don't like the way they ruled. I disagree with the Supreme Court from the standpoint they should have given the state -- it should be a states' rights issue. And that's the way it should have been ruled on, Chris, not the way they did it.
This is a very surprising ruling. And I -- I can see changes coming down the line, frankly. But I would have much preferred that they ruled at a state level and allowed the states to make those rulings themselves.
WALLACE: But -- but just to button this up very quickly, sir, are you saying that if you become president, you might try to appoint justices to overrule the decision on same-sex marriage?
"But we also have to have an organized effort against
gangs," Hillary Clinton said in a C-SPAN video clip.
"Just as in a previous generation we had an organized
effort against the mob. We need to take these people
on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they
are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the
kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no
conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they
ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to
heel."
So, no, it's a twisting of words. But not limited to the Trump campaign. Trump didn't call all Mexicans rapists, either.
But he did say that about immigrants. Or maybe illegal immigrants if you want to specially charitable. If he would said that about mexican gangs people would be less angry about it.
You can argue semantics of the full quote, but the only way you get to, "Trump called all Mexicans rapists" is: a) ignoring the context of the remarks being on illegal immigration, b) implying examples apply to the entire population, and c) ignoring the remainder of his remarks.
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their
best. [...] They’re sending people that have lots of
problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us.
They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re
rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
If you want to argue pure semantics, you have to be concerned that Trump thinks Mexico is sending people, you should be confused about how "they" bring problems "with us", and stuck in a moral quandary about how all Mexicans in the U.S. are drug-toting criminal rapists who are also good people (maybe). You could never get to "all Mexicans" unless Mexico is "sending" 100% of its population.
Or, you interpret the remarks to mean that illegal Mexican immigrants are more likely to be drug-users, criminals, and rapists, with the immediate and explicit caveat that this charge does not imply to all illegal Mexican immigrants, because at least "some" of them are good people.
And if she was referring to gangs of minority kids (as she was in context) is it at least a bit like it?
"But we also have to have an organized effort against gangs," Hillary Clinton said in a C-SPAN video clip. "Just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel."
Bernie seemed to think so:
When Sanders was asked by debate moderator why he called out Bill Clinton out for his defense of Clinton’s use of the term "superpredator," Sanders responded, "Because it was a racist term, and everyone knew it was a racist term."
If she would call nazis super predators no one would imply she's bigoted against whites.
To be fair. I agree she could and should have used better phrasing. I can also understand people like Sanders for criticise her. Maybe she even was bigoted 20 years age when she said that, or maybe she still is. But you have to interpret her words extremely uncharitably to infer that.
Here we are trying to figure out if here comments about gangs could be problematic while comparing her to Trump, who said this about mexican immigrants, not just mexican gangs: "They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people!".
A bunch of black people are saying "this is racist" so step one is taking what they say seriously and considering their point of view.
Beyond that: for many people, youth or juvenile crime is considered a failure by society, and lamented. Kids were neglected, went wrong, and we lost them to crime. When the issue is black youth crime however, their identity is pathologized and the perpetrators are subject to dehumanization through terms. "superpredator": these black youths aren't like Johnny shoplifting a comic book from Walgreens, they are inhuman killing machines that prey on the rest of us. "bring them to heel" this is something you make a dog do. An out of control mad dog, who needs to be corrected through force.
I don't think Clinton _meant_ it to be racist. Believe it or not I don't think Trump did either. But I'd say both of them said racist things in the sense that they both fell into patterns that denigrate and otherize minorities.
>"They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people!".
The stats said that 1 in 4 women who cross the border illegally were raped. Trump was talking about the rapists, not all Mexican. He said some Mexicans are good. Some are criminals. And some are rapists. There is nothing racist about this.
> Why is it that when poor minorities vote for their economic well-being it is seen as progress but when poor white people do it it's seen as racism?
I don't have a problem with voting for or against a trade deal based on self-interest or interest in maximizing benefit for one's country.
Dehumanizing people with a different skin color who are already citizens of your country (Gonzalo Curiel, Humayun Khan) and cultivating racism and xenophobia to win power is unconscionable.
> Bill Clinton
I'd like to think that if he had faced election after the Monica Lewinsky incident, he would have lost.
As opposed to demonizing people for "clinging to their guns and religion" or calling people "deplorable"?
It's the same thing. Both sides are engaging in this bigotry. You can't write off almost 50% of the electorate (Romney's 47% statement in 2012 and Clinton's deplorables comment) and expect anything but extremes.
I'm sure people didn't like being called deplorable. But they weren't called that for no reason. They weren't called that because they were simply supporting a Republican. They weren't called that for supporting Romney or McCain.
Trump is a cancer of a person and supporting a man and the policies of a man who's openly transitioning our election system to one based on lies and racist demagoguery is simply, demonstrably deplorable. Relative to values like truth and tolerance that that we should share/ostensibly share.
Of course it was careless of Clinton to get caught saying it, but the deplorable behavior had to exist before she had a reason to comment on it.
I didn't like being called irredeemable as part of her "basket of deplorables" who "are not America". That's calling for my liquidation, a major thing from the cultural Baby Boom she belongs to.
And she didn't "get caught saying it", that was part of a prepared speech, and one she only later said she "regretted" saying, not that she was wrong about it.
You'll have to forgive me if my response to this is less than completely polite....
To be fair, she was saying that to acknowledge to her supporters that yes, many Trump supporters are irredeemable as a preface to saying that many others are redeemable and do have real concerns that Democrats ought to try to address, or try to communicate the ways that they already try to address them better.
I don't think there was anything wrong with that part of that speech per se, though in the context of a political campaign it was absolutely a dumb thing to say, even though the sentiment was both accurate and aimed at encouraging reaching out to the other side. Someone should have known what kind of sound-bite that section of the speech was going to be cut down to and heavily reworded it so that wouldn't happen.
You expect me to personally give a shit that there's another basket containing people she thinks can be reeducated, when I and my family are in the basket marked for liquidation? Note also how that seriously personalized the campaign for us deplorables, clearly moved it to a "will crawl over broken glass to get to the polling booth"; existential threats will do that, you know.
Even if you don't accept my analysis of the coding of her language, how can you tell me with a straight face she was "encouraging reaching out to the" irredeemables? That's very specific religious language, per Merriam Webster "not able to be saved, helped, or made better". What were they supposed to do in this/after this "reaching out"???
And whatever happened to being the President of all Americans? Even Obama shows every sign of believing that, despite his looking down his nose on us bitter clingers, treating us as "enemies" to be defeated and the like.
That's why my family voted for Obama over Hillary in the 2008 primary (by then McCain had the Republican one locked up and Missouri has open primaries). Obama is no prize, but he's not a fraction as dangerous as Hillary and to a lessor extend Bill. We had lived through and remembered their first co-presidency all too well.
> You expect me to personally give a shit that there's another basket containing people she thinks can be reeducated, when I and my family are in the basket marked for liquidation? Note also how that seriously personalized the campaign for us deplorables, clearly moved it to a "will crawl over broken glass to get to the polling booth"; existential threats will do that, you know.
It seemed pretty clear to me that the "deplorables" were the side of his support that made him "not a nazi, but the first choice of nazis", ya know? Considering what trump was doing with his half-courting but no-I'm-totally-not some fairly disgusting groups and sentiments, and what she actually said in the speech isn't really out there and the qualifiers leave her comments accurate and even generous:
I mean, she enumerated which part of his base she meant to put in that group, and allowed that some portion of even that part could be reached, let alone the ones who were not put in the deplorables "basket" and have legit problems with e.g. how globalization has left them rather screwed or with political corruption or who actually do want stronger borders but not because they dislike Hispanics (putting aside that she was a candidate especially unqualified to reach anyone for whom those and related things are major concerns—which is probably why someone as incredibly unelectable and also not terribly well positioned to credibly claim those sorts of positions as Trump managed to soundly beat her). As for "re-education", the language for the rest was pretty standard "these people aren't awful and have real problems and we haven't done a good enough job of telling them how we'll address those" stuff. "Re-education" is... kinda "we're gonna get herded into FEMA camps! No really, I read it on the Internet!" territory. Reading that "coding" doesn't strike me as reasonable, no.
However, though the speech wasn't inaccurate and the message was a good one to deliver to her base, it was really stupid in the context of this political race, and thinking it'd play well when cut down to a few words could speak to a certain arrogance which I wouldn't be surprised to find was very much present in Clinton and her campaign. Expecting any of the nuance of the speech, so central to its meaning, to be preserved was really, really dumb.
> That's why my family voted for Obama over Hillary in the 2008 primary (by then McCain had the Republican one locked up and Missouri has open primaries). Obama is no prize, but he's not a fraction as dangerous as Hillary and to a lessor extend Bill. We had lived through and remembered their first co-presidency all too well.
Aside from Greenspan maybe not doing enough to cool off the "irrational exuberance" of the stock market to make the later crash more mild, what were the big errors made by Bill Clinton's administration that made it worse than any other typical 8-year period in recent US history? I'm struggling to think of a recent-ish president who didn't have more serious scandals and blunders than Clinton. Carter—generally ineffective; Reagan—Iran/Contra and related were pretty awful; Bush Sr. wasn't terrible but got screwed by the business cycle and a too-public pledge to stick to excessively limited tax policy, he'd be a good contender for "not worse than Clinton" I guess; W. had Iraq which was ZOMGWTF bad, and his tax cuts were probably not the right call and left a giant shadow on the budget; Obama may or may not have been able to guide or halt the Arab Spring and related events to some better outcome, but I'm leaning toward "may" and will go ahead and call that worse than any blunders of Clinton's that I can recall. I think the jury's still out on things like permanent normalization of trade with China, which was probably going to happen regardless of whether President was D or R at that time, and besides, that was near the end of his second term and not really something you'd "live through" during his presidency, as if it made one's life a struggle at that time.
What was so unusually bad about the presidency '93-'00? Seriously curious, not a rhetorical question.
what were the big errors made by Bill Clinton's administration that made it worse than any other typical 8-year period in recent US history?
His murdering a hundred religious dissidents in their home for starters? Their disproportionate viciousness towards anyone who happened to be in their way, e.g. Billy Dale, or committed lèse-majesté? To get on Obama's IRS shit list you have to engage in political activism and it's a nothing personal, just your group thing, it took way way less for the Clintons. There's lots more, which I'm not going to go into, for the simple fact is that I can now relegate the Clinton Crime Family into the ash heap of history.
As for "FEMA camps" et. al., I'm talking about the pre-FEMA period (when we still pretended to care about our civilian population surviving, my mother was in fact a Civil Defense Block Mother, I still have the metal sign), when re-education was a PRC and Communist Vietnam concept starting in the mid-late '60s (Cultural Revolution).
And if you think that's all horribly irrelevant nowadays, our current President launched his political career in the home of two of the most notorious of those engaging in the Left's beloved Direct Action, who explicitly planned to liquidate the roughly 10% of of the population they guessed couldn't be re-educated.
However, I'd say that especially with your takes on current history, we just aren't living in the same reality, and should keep our discussion narrowly focused.
Or just put it in the ash heap Hillary and Bill are now in ^_^, really, at this point what difference does it make?
> However, I'd say that especially with your takes on current history, we just aren't living in the same reality, and should keep our discussion narrowly focused.
> Or just put it in the ash heap Hillary and Bill are now in ^_^, really, at this point what difference does it make?
Yeah, sure, that's cool. Thanks for keeping things civil despite the topic, nice, interesting exchange (not being sarcastic, I'll add, since it's sometimes hard to tell on the Internet).
And, seriously, thinking about it, after today/right now! I should just steer clear of all things Clinton until the pardons are handed out, or not, and focus on the future. They've been "living rent free in my brain" for ... 24 years now !?!!?!!!!
Another reason I'm happy Trump put two political dynasties in the ash heap of history this year, add 4 to 12 years for the Bushes....
> I didn't like being called irredeemable as part of her "basket of deplorables" who "are not America".
Xenophobia, prejudice, and intolerance aren't what Clinton sees as America. If those things are what you see as America, that's your right. In which case there's an irreconcilable gap between you and Clinton and you need to accept that she's going to consider you as standing outside of those values that she has always taken for granted as broadly accepted.
Be the thing you want others to see you as, or else accept the consequences of being seen a different way. Don't be surprised or complain about it.
Would you call Romney a racist (and if so, why isn't Hillary also one?)
Trump got ~30% of the Hispanic vote, despite the Spanish media's immense negativity, despite the candidate's lukewarm campaigning in LatAm heavy communities. He also won more black votes than Romney and he won more white women than Hillary (a woman). It's hard to square what you are saying with what the results showed.
I don't think you understand. The very word "racist" has lost all effect. It is not an argument. It is not a disqualifier. It is meaningless and hollow.
If there is one thing the left should learn from this election, it is that screaming hollow epithets like racist, homophobic, misogynist, etc, are no longer sufficient to scare us, silence us, and cow us into submission.
Really? From my perspective those words do carry a lot of weight. And that a President of the United States, or anyone really, is ok with brandishing any and all of those tags makes me sad and really pessimistic, also determined to make those epithets count again, it's a line I will push back from.
All you're telling us is that, presumably as not one of the targets who's been told they are these things for decades, perhaps all their life, "those words do carry a lot of weight".
All we're telling you is that, as those who've indeed been told that for so long, those words are dead to us.
And I'd add they're word salad to the other side when used generically in a political campaign, with about as much semantic meaningless as Blue or Green in pre-Nika riot Constantinople.
Shades of Bill Maher saying, sorry about crying wolf over our telling you the Current Year Republican presidential candidate was Literally Hitler (although he should have gone all the way back to the first example in 1948), this time we really mean it.
Circling back to your desire to re-imbue meaning to them, I don't think you'll see that in your lifetime. See, for example, the hundred year cycle of progressive -> liberal -> getting back to but not quite there yet progressive. When words and the concepts behind them get burned like this, it's really hard to recover.
And, yeah, it's much worse than the surface which we've mostly been discussing this at, the very concepts have been rendered stone cold dead.
It might be my not being American, also not on the left, but what I am reading (perhaps erroneously) is: yes, "we" (you and GP) have been called racist, homophobic, misogynist, etc. for so long …and from being called those words there's no introspection as to whether one is perhaps factually so disrespectful of the basic dignity of other human beings that it would be decent to reconsider?
Maybe it will indeed be really hard to recover. Then again, my determination just got reinforced.
A very interesting analysis, but you need to add the time dimension to the issue of introspection, the boy who cried wolf example I mentioned (and, of course, in that Aesop the wolf did eventually come...).
Did I engage in introspection the first time I was called racist in this context? Yes, of course. 10th time? I don't think so.
The danger here, of course, is that having stopped outside sparked introspection after the message became perceived as a "Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think I'll go eat worms!" one, I of course may have drifted into it.
Almost certainly a bigger factor in the US is that this has been used to divide us for political gain, and now that we've become an polity where identity rules, it's anti-survival to continue to play by the old no longer operative rules. For a degree of automatic discrimination against other identities who are in direct, existential competition with me as a white, heterosexual male is a requirement if I want me and mine to survive the next few decades.
Call it racism (except, of course, We Don't Care), call it realism, those facts on the ground have to changed before movement towards your ideals can be realized in the US.
I still think that the media had a massive influence on the election - the fact that they all were pushing a particular choice (and attacking any discussion of the negatives of that candidate in an aggressive, illiberal way) tripped the public's Pravda breaker (they went into the uncanny valley of journalism?), and killed all of her support at the margins.
As for Trump, he won with fewer votes than McCain or Romney. The suspicion caused by the spirited media advocacy (the media being one of the only groups with a lower approval rating than Congress or Clinton/Trump) made people who suspected that they had been suckered by Obama into voting for the oligarchy were absolutely sure that they were being suckered into voting for Clinton.
The US media used to be better at this. It was the advantage that we had over the USSR.
As for Trump, he won with fewer votes than McCain or Romney.
Do we have any reliable figures for this as of yet? Preliminary ones, sure....
The suspicion caused by the spirited media advocacy (the media being one of the only groups with a lower approval rating than Congress or Clinton/Trump) made people who suspected that they had been suckered by Obama into voting for the oligarchy were absolutely sure that they were being suckered into voting for Clinton.
One, if not the key to Trump's victory was the Rust Belt, where the above analysis fits rather nicely with the facts on the ground. Whatever role a "Pravda breaker" played (I love the concept), the voters in those states that put Obama over the top in 2008 then voted for Trump 8 years later (which also does a fair job of killing the "they're racists!" argument).
> One, if not the key to Trump's victory was the Rust Belt, where the above analysis fits rather nicely with the facts on the ground. Whatever role a "Pravda breaker" played (I love the concept), the voters in those states that put Obama over the top in 2008 then voted for Trump 8 years later (which also does a fair job of killing the "they're racists!" argument).
Obama ran as a changemaker for the working class. Clinton ran on an everything's fine platform. If you didn't think that everything was fine, and you were at least mildly racist or honestly believed that Trump wasn't, you switched from Obama to Trump. If you didn't think that everything was fine and were disappointed in Obama, and you were black, or not racist at all, you stayed home. If you thought that the only problem with Obama was Republicans, liked to think of yourself as a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, worked in professional services, and were educated and eating good, or if you were one of the mass media-credulous, you turned out for Clinton.
A thing I've been amused by over the past few days is how clear it was that none of the print/internet media had any stories or analysis prepared for the possibility that Trump won. Like Brexit (or Corbyn), it simply wasn't part of their concept of reality.
You seem to be focusing on papers that usually endorse Democrats. Of course it is not surprising that their endorsements did not sway many voters.
I think that the important point, though, is that there are also a lot of newspapers that usually endorse Republicans, and far more of those went for Clinton this time than Trump.
Wikipedia has a nice sortable table here [1], showing endorsement, circulation, and who the paper endorsed in 2012. Sort it by 2012 endorsement, and scroll down to the Romney endorsements
I don't mean to evade your request but I'm typing this on my phone while on a break at work so I don't have specific articles I can link to at the moment.
Off the top of my head I can give you some general topics I have found lacking in detail and nuance. The LA Times specifically has done a poor job imo on accurately representing some of the opposition to high density developments here in LA.
They also ran this piece [1] on Elon Musk's empire of subsidies which I thought was lacking in context. Disclaimer: I work at SpaceX so I'm obviously biased. There can certainly be criticism of subsidies given to Tesla/SpaceX, but when an article such as this makes no mention of the auto bailouts, or the similar subsidies given to the defense and oil industry I don't find it particularly balanced.
I've also found much of the NY Times reporting on Snowden to push a very national security establishment agenda. My apologies for not being able to give more concrete examples at this time, I hope you understand my statement was made in good faith.
Look up just about anything NYT has written about US wars in the past 15 years. Up until very recently, NYT even had an editorial policy against using the word "torture" in reference to any act committed by the US government / military.
Not too mention that Maggie Haberman and Mark Liebovich (and probably a few others too that I'm not aware of) can be found in the Podesta emails sending over their articles to the Clinton campaign for review, prior to publication.
> Not too mention that Maggie Haberman and Mark Liebovich (and probably a few others too that I'm not aware of) can be found in the Podesta emails sending over their articles to the Clinton campaign for review, prior to publication.
Can you reference the source for this? I ask because much of what I've seen between what WikiLeaks tweets and what's actually contained within the email messages is severely taken out of context. (e.g. not understanding what news embargos are [1]) The New York Times were also the ones who originally broke the story of the private email server.
Here's a Clinton campaign strategy document that mentions Haberman and how she has "teed up many stories for us before and [we] have never been disappointed":
Doing an advanced search on Wikileaks filtering by "nytdirect@nytimes.com" in the sender field, you'll see that the first drafts of nearly 50 different articles were sent to John Podesta:
Thank you, but in the second link, this appears to be a newsletter email from the First Draft blog on the NY Times [1]. The DocumentCloud link is certainly not verifiable as it contains only the single page.
You're right about those first drafts, my mistake.
That Clinton campaign strategy documents comes from, apparently, the Guccifer 2.0 hacks. Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang contacted Nick Merrill to confirm the document's authenticity, but received no response.
NYT links are all paywalled for me, but I can't envision any possible excuse for what he did. I understand that "access" is a tricky problem and involves some moral grey area, but sending articles ahead of time for revision and "vetoing", and asking for permission to use a quote... those both strike me as a clear failure in journalistic ethics.
So should journalists simply never agree to have conversations off the record?
I think there are big problems with the way access and coverage are mixed up together and traded on, but I'm pretty comfortable with a journalist agreeing not to publish remarks made during a conversation and then later asking to publish some of them.
The one thing I appreciate from editorial boards are recommendations for the down ballot elections. I don't know who these people are and their goals are usually difficult to describe in a blurb. At least I can get a third-party blurb about why I should vote for them. Online doesn't seem to really have a solution for this, as everyone wants to write about the main event, not the local races.
I guess that's because in the UK "It's The Sun Wot Won It".[0] Summary: It is believed some media, like The Sun, have a big effect on elections' results, like with the recent Brexit referendum. This led some people to believe it's pretty much impossible to win against sensationalist media in the UK. (But please correct me if I'm wrong, that's my take after living in London for around 6 years.) And so Trump can be thought of as a surprise given his victory against the overall media landscape.
[EDIT: I'm not the poster, but this is a real enough consideration these days I thought I'd provide an answer.]
Because in today's "cheerleader" style of politics... where it's more important what team you're on than anything else of substance... there is an assumption that if you say something that could be considered favorable to one "team" that you must be a member of that "team". The assumption that you're just being thoughtful, reflective and just considering the deeper questions seems to be off the table these days.
I felt it would add context to the fact that while my vote aligned with the broader opinion of the LA Times editorial board, insofar as not voting for Trump, this was in no way based on their endorsement and I found it somewhat off-putting that the author would assume that their endorsement would make much of a difference to me.
Clearly to attempt to limit the aggressive ad hominem that passes for discourse on the internet amongst the marketing-sensitive.
If you want to criticize Apple, say you're an Apple fan even if you're not, if you want to criticize the Cubs, say you're a Cub fan even if you're not, same if you want to criticize a Christopher Nolan movie or a policy of the current government of Spain. Some people get so steeped in a particular marketing environment that any hint of a contradiction of one of its axioms gets treated like a blasphemy that is sinful to acknowledge or listen to, and is responded to by marketing-dictated rote, not with thought.
Trump person: "I think it's good that Trump wants to get us out of TPP - why do people call them "free" trade agreements anyway when they add so many protectionist regulations on consumers, and only free capital and finance?"
This fear is rooted in a continued misunderstanding of the election result by people in tech. Voters didn't vote for Trump because they read some fake news story on Facebook, they voted for him out of economic desperation. They weren't tricked or mislead into it.
Yeah. There's going to be millions of words spouted about this in the next week or so from people trying to explain the result, but I think the simple reality - as with Brexit - is that a large section of society are just sick of the way they are being treated.
Perhaps due to overconfidence (to the point of arrogance) that they'd win, as with Brexit, some on the 'losing side' have to tell themselves, or anyone that will listen, that people who voted differently did so because they're stupid, misled or otherwise didn't know what they were doing.
People who voted Trump and people who voted Brexit knew exactly what they were doing and had their own real and personal reasons for doing so.
There's also a Maslow hierarchy argument: millions of people have lost their jobs due to a variety of reasons, from "outsourcing" to "automation" to the "energy revolution". Social arguments, KKK, racism, etc. are meaningless when you worry about putting food on the table. Trump appealed to that sense.
The truth is that most of these jobs aren't coming back. Trump told them what they want to hear, namely that he will fight to bring back the jobs. Clinton told them what they had to hear, namely that many of these jobs aren't coming back and we need to figure out where the displaced workers fit in the working society. Needless to say, voters preferred Trump's messaging.
I see this kind of reasoning frequently, but I remember reading a study that showed that most of the Trump supporters were actually not victims of job-outsourcing and had good economic standing. Not sure if it was a non-partisan, credible study but unless you have good sources you might be theorizing?
I know of several people that voted for Trump. They live in an area where the economy isn't great, but they aren't in any way economically desperate (one is mildly wealthy, another in a household with more than double the local median income, excellent benefits).
Did people who feel left out give Trump his margin? I think they probably did. Are they his only supporters? Hell no.
I know a slew of people that voted for Trump. Many are in their 20's and 30's and have been treading water since finishing college. Many more are a lot are older and solidly middle class or upper middle class, but are watching their children flounder.
While the people you mention might not be economically left behind, they don't have a voice in the US media. _That_ is monopolized by the left (as evidenced by the article we're commenting on). There are other ways to be "left behind" than economic. Media is power, it was used against half of the population in the US; they didn't like that.
First, it's based on the same older self-reported exit polling that led 538 to completely mispredict the election, so you should immediately be skeptical of the data.
Second, it only takes into account self-reported current income blocks, not change in income over the last decade or so, which is what many Trump voters are angry about. For example, making $70k today might seem ok if you look at the table and see median state income is only $65k, but that means nothing to someone who made $90k in 2007 and has never been able to get income back to that level.
Third, it also ignores future predictions based on current state of affairs for voters. It's not very comforting if you make higher than the median income in your area, but your job is on the chopping block. Trump picked up far more non-college educated voters, for whom future job prospects look worse and worse every year, even if they have gainful employment today.
Unfortunately I do not. It's very hard to find cohort-type labor stats at a large level among the typical wage and unemployment indexes. BLS does have the NLS study [1], but it doesn't quite cover the right things. Mostly what you get is individual stories like [2], which add up to a picture that at least many people believe, even if it isn't 100% true.
It's hard to put exactly one reason on why Trump was elected and Clinton was not. I got the feeling more it was a rejection of the insider/elitist makeup of politics. Many people expected this rejection when Obama ran for "change" in 2008, but didn't see any change in how the political class conducts business.
This a 1,000 times. I can't believe that everyone believes that people voted for Trump because of the things he did or said. They voted for him, I did at least, as a rejection of the status quo and the crony capitalism that, imho, is gutting this nation.
Let me expand on that a little bit. My point isn't to mock you or cast aspersions or whatever, it is to make it clear that there were those of us that saw things differently 3 days ago. I'm not despondent, I'm going to try to wait and see what happens with an open mind. But my expectation is very much that people who voted Trump in to 'drain the swamp' or such are not going to get what they are expecting. We are going to see a combination of Trump serving Trump and the establishment engulfing him.
> Voters didn't vote for Trump because ... they voted for him out of ...
I'd like to propose a rule on HN, Don't make claims about issues like this without a serious factual basis. We have more than enough speculation already; more is just spam.
There will be deeper analysis done in the months to come as more data is gathered but it's clear from the initial data that economic anxiety did play a role in the election outcome:
Really? The entire election can be boiled down to a single, concrete, easily understood reason? There's no diversity of thought at all? How remarkable.
It's funny how if HRC had won they would be praising FB for spreading the word. Obama was probably the first candidate to really use technology and social media effectively and was also praised for its use. Now that Trump has won FB is bad.
I saw a person on my FB feed the other night say that she knew Trump was going to take away her right to vote now that he won, and her post was like by many. Trump is flawed in many ways, but that is absurd.
Most(all?) of us here know to go and fact things we read, but this is not a new thing. The media has always been this way. The nightly news shaped the public by what stories they told and left out. It's not a FB problem, but a people problem who surround themselves only with groups that confirm their already existing opinions, and stop questioning.
>Obama was probably the first candidate to really use technology and social media effectively and was also praised for its use. Now that Trump has won FB is bad.
Also bothers me people in tech are only now starting to worry about the data they collect. Seems like it was absolutely fine to harvest the hell out of their users and hand it on a silver platter to the government when someone they like is in charge. Now it's suddenly a problem.
(Hopefully they'll be more responsible from now on)
I think the issue is that hindsight is always 20/20 so while people praised Obama for reaching out to younger generations and those who primarily receive news through social media, people couldn't imagine a candidate who would sway voters by pathologically lying, attacking, and spreading bullshit. And they also couldn't imagine an electorate that wouldn't be able to differentiate between what was reality and what was bullshit.
>I saw a person on my FB feed the other night say that she knew Trump was going to take away her right to vote now that he won, and her post was like by many. Trump is flawed in many ways, but that is absurd.
Once again, the hyperbole does nothing but make people think you are making things up. No one is taking away a womans right to vote. Period. Whether you or I agree with the issues listed there, some do have a valid other side.
On its face, nothing is wrong with wanting to make sure a voter is who they say they are. Requiring an ID could also be too much of a hurdle though. There are reasonable and valid to sides of that argument.
Early voting is sort of a hit and miss. People voting too early may mean they miss important facts leading up to the election. But then, it can be hard to vote on the day of.
The problem is that even getting to vote has become too political because in general higher turnout is good for the Democrats and lower turnout good for the GOP. I wonder if some stat came out saying people who early voted for Trump really wanted to change after they learned more but could not, would the ACLU change their tune on early voting?
Apparently they don't believe that social media worked in HRCs favor? I've seen many posts comparing Trump to Hitler . I don't think this article would have been printed if Hillary won, because she was the choice of most media outlets. When would Facebook stop with the moderating/fact checking? Would they allow personal false stories, but not official ones?
This smacks of a journalist frantically attempting to remain relevant, similar to CNN saying:
Remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s
different for the media. So everything you learn about this,
you’re learning from us.
Maybe if they didn't suck, people would still go to them for news. But as it stands, journalists with that "proclivity for fact checking" that the author mentions universally failed to see Trump winning. Their echo chamber is no better than most peoples' Facebook feeds these days.
Those are baseless assertions about made-up facts (including a fabricated quote). That's the difference between random information on the Internet and serious journalism.
The former is sensational and provokes an emotional reaction, but those don't indicate truth. IME when professional communicators, like political leaders and news sources, increase the former, it's a very good sign that they lack the latter.
Insinuating that he is in fact to blame. The article doesn't make an argument that he is (other then repeatedly mentioning that he didn't say who he voted for), but intent of the headline is obvious.
I wonder why Zuckerberg (and the people behind Twitter) weren't as equally blamed when the Arab Spring started. As far as I remember both FB and Twitter were heralded as pinnacles of democracy back then by some of the same journalists who now decry how "social media is helping spread bullshit facts".
I don't understand this. AFAICT, parent is implying it's meaningful to compare Middle Easterners sharing information about protests and violence, and Westerners sharing unverifiably truthy HuffPo/Breitbart/whatever articles.
It's true that both of those examples boil down to 'humans digitally sharing information', but the circumstances surrounding both the humans and the information are so different as to make this kind of reductive comparison useless.
Hillary lost because of Facebook, Zuckerberg, Bernie, twitter, FBI, Russia, Deplorables, racists, sexists, Obama, .... Its not her fault that she lost to the worst candidate ever.
Tech media as well as news outlets are becoming (maybe they alway were) a sewer. I somehow understand you write praises for and don't seem to notice bad things about Hillary, but tech press writes reviews of laptops and cameras, that if I didn't know better I would believe. Apple Macbook, Fujifilm T something, have serious flaws and not a peep from them.
Gizmodo used to be laughing stock, but now I feel like most of main tech outlets are oblivious to real world. Verge just can't report anything substantial.
This is just establishment trying to pin the blame and understand how they didn't manage to manipulate people into doing what they wanted us to do.
"Program or be programmed" - Rushkoff said it best.
In a world where your Rushkoffs[1] go unread, we are spiraling into some sort of local maxima where social media is realized for what it is, and the problems associated with social media are epidemic.
The crux of the issue lies in the fact that nobody knows what social media is, or indeed cyber. "Cyber" as it stands now is some far off place, in a William Gibson fantasy, but infact operates in the world seemingly un-noticed by the smartphone equipped masses.
As I said; it's not long until people realize they've been played and their eyeball hours and data exhausts are being sold to the highest bidder for hard cash. It makes me wonder why smartphones even cost so much. Surely they should be 'free' given how much data can be gleaned from a smartphone owner?
I have had this feeling for a year but I think FBs decline has started. Facebook Inc always presents growth during their quarterly report, but the truth is that its growing in "3rd world" countries but dying in the western world.
I admit I do have a facebook account, but its only used for events and messenger. I havent posted for like 4 years now. The few times I check FB its filled with memes, autoplaying videos and few individuals who seems to be very noisy.
The gut feelings is that facebook.com will become less valuable, but I still think facebook inc will keep growing. They have acquired Whatsapp and Instagram so in a way they have maintained a significant section of the people who "left" facebook.com.
I would love to hear the opinion of other people on this matter.
I went through and unfollowed every single person and group on my facebook, life is far more pleasant. Boy the unimaginable amount of people basing their lives off sharing memes and untrue articles was just plain unbelievable.
I have a few close friends and a plethora of acquaintances. A lot of my closest friends aren't particularly politically motivated so we don't talk about it much, but plenty of my acquaintances are. Now I don't argue with them anymore and read books instead. Much preferred.
That's a squishy headline. That Facebook is too influential (both directly in terms of the impact of their policies, and indirectly in terms of its power as a misinformation amplification device) is abundantly clear.
Not to say that I have a solution for it. Anything I can think of has its own problems. But, we should accept as a truism that any centralized service with that much sway over multiple hours of hundreds of millions of people's days is "too influential".
Regulators should shutdown or deny fb many of the privileges it currently has; consumers should minimize or avoid Fb altogether. Its doable, I stopped using Fb regularly two years ago and now I only check my page twice or thrice a year.
Fb is not in any way essential for daily living.
“Technological change is mostly inevitable ... I don't think we could have avoided what's happened. Often when technology causes a problem, it also hands you a solution. I'm hoping that will be the case here. But I'm damned if I know what it is.”
I think these are common cop-outs, easy irresponsibility by people in our industry (in fact, I'm omitting the speaker becasue my comment is about the industry and not to pick apart the words of someone who spoke off-the-cuff in a moment). They only work because outsiders exalt us and don't question us (yet), and insiders don't question these ideas because they serves our interest and we hear them so much that the ideas have become normalized. But let's look at them with fresh eyes:
* "Technological change is mostly inevitable" is just really a way to rationalize doing whatever you want without the burdens of accountability and responsibility - 'there's nothing I can do, it's inevitable!'. It's similar to 'God made me do it' or 'I was following orders'.
* "Often when technology causes a problem, it also hands you a solution." As I understand the implication, the premise is that the problem is unanticipated and the solution a reaction. But that again avoids responsibility: Many problems of tech, especially the consequences of spreading misinformation widely, can be anticipated and dealt with proactively. Also, it assumes that some god, Technology, is giving and withholding things - again it's out of our hands.
* "I'm damned if I know what it is." That's another rationalization to avoid responsibility, a common one: a claim of helplessness. People in SV pride themselves on solving the impossible; probably these words wouldn't be heard if solving the problem was a priority.
I'd like to see Facebook add an 'Unverified' reaction button. I know people can post rebuttals in comments but making it easier and more visible may help people report factually unsupported stuff.
It could have an question mark icon to emphasize that there are questions remaining around a post.
Facebook might eventually use this to lower visibility of articles that are widely marked as 'Unverified'
So, in other words, the people of America are not capable of interpreting information when it is not tightly controlled by a small number of outlets. Therefore we, the elite that know better, need to manage this medium so that they get the information that we deem correct.
Hyperbole aside, we're probably better off using this as a tipping point for teaching people to think critically.
For every online platform that controls political messaging there will be an alternate platform that allows it to flow. It's the nature of the web, you can't put it back in the bottle now.
edit: not that bubbles don't exist - suggest you expand your own bubble. Relevant preview from Adam Curtis' new doc:
You're trying to pin Trump as using Mom and Pop level tech to convince the uneducated while Hilary was using good and honest woke tech for intellectuals.
If that were the case why did Trump have a following on Reddit ten times the size of HRC?
HRC may have had Twitter in the liberal tech echo chamber you follow but America is bigger than just that. The Trump campaign used social media highly effectively (often in awful ways) and it wasn't just taking advantage of senile old Facebook users like you seem to be trying to sell it as.
No it's not. People just in general have a herd mentality. If social signals are important to you, if your need to fit in is more important than having your own opinion then no amount of "fixing" the algorithm is going to change that.
Furthermore those 40% comes from all sorts of papers but all but one was against Trump. Yet he won.
Fake news is only useful to fuel your anger if you have already decided. The reason why people are swing voters is exactly because they weight in many factors not because they let themselves be fooled by fake news IMO.
Furthermore the beauty of networks like Facebook and Twitter is that they are self-correcting. The lie doesn't travel faster than the rebuttal of that lie.
Lastly I am not sure the article has a very clear idea of what actually constitutes a lie since a lot of those lies are really just different interpretation of the same things. And FB is actually quite good at having related articles of something which often will have different views in them.
Facebook is one of the places where you actually meet most people of dissenting views to yours.
> Furthermore the beauty of networks like Facebook and Twitter is that they are self-correcting. The lie doesn't travel faster than the rebuttal of that lie.
I don't think this is entirely true, as the lie and its rebuttal are likely to be travelling within independent filter bubbles. One bubble sees the lie, the other sees the rebuttal, and both think all is well.
'Facebook is one of the places where you actually meet most people of dissenting views to yours.'
I think Facebook has a strong motivation to tailor the newsfeed algorithm to keep you longer on Facebook, see more ads, generate more clicks and revenue etc, so there might be a case to be made in order to engage you more, the algorithm should show you more content you like or tend to agree with than ones you would not want to engage with (remember Facebook doesn't have a dislike button), so I think its not really a great place to meet most people of dissenting views to yours, I would actually speculate that its probably the other way around, Facebook is one fo the places where you meet most people sharing the same views as yours.
> I think Facebook has a strong motivation to tailor the newsfeed algorithm to keep you longer on Facebook
I agree, though you take that to mean they must want to show the user things she likes. Me personally, the best way to keep me on anything is to show me someone making an almost good argument but with a few crippling flaws. I'll spend hours on the rebuttal.
That said, I believe you're right that Facebook skews towards your likes over intelligently tailoring the stream for us argumentative folks.
If social signals are important to you, if your need to fit in is more important than having your own opinion then no amount of "fixing" the algorithm is going to change that.
Removing the algorithm (or at least defaulting it to 'off') so users can see everything, and consequently see whether they hold a majority opinion or not, would go some way to fixing the problem. At the moment someone can be in a tiny minority yet feel like everyone around them feels the same way, giving them a wildly skewed view of the real world.
People do have a herd mentality but that doesn't argue against the influence of Facebook but for it.
In a world of personalized algorithms, A-B testing, nudging, etc, that Facebook and how it works certain having a significant effect on people who use it on an aggregate level is fairly obviously.
Just because people have an inclination towards something negative doesn't mean a tool that enables it is blameless.
As a thought experiment: If people are inherently somewhat violent, would someone who gave everyone a gun not be influential in what happened after?
If social signals are important to you, the algorithm that presents those social signals is really important, no? What a herd mentality does depends on how the herd is made. Rebuttals to lies don't travel as fast as lies at all, especially not when the system is designed to keep audiences engaged by only presenting them with whichever side makes them feel better.
so it basically says you need some censorship into the social media? who is going to censor the content then? maybe consult with some countries that are good at censorship.
or just develop some new AI algorithm that does fact-check with a colored button, the darker it is the more fake it is, or something like that?
On the contrary, Facebook is the one place where people get pushed out of their filter bubbles regularly.
You know your racist family member you see sharing conspiracy theories on Facebook? That's reality, that's something punching through the filter bubble.
It's precisely because Facebook is full of hometown and family connections that it lets these ideas leak across. It makes Facebook feel pretty bad sometimes, because filter bubbles are very pleasant.
I respectfully disagree - after the election, my liberal friends filled my timeline with screeds about the death of America and minorities, while my conservative friends messaged me privately in celebration. I didn't see a single pro-Trump post all day.
As a centrist, the level of vitriol was very shocking, and it did not come from the party you'd expect.
> my liberal friends filled my timeline with screeds about the death of America and minorities, while my conservative friends messaged me privately in celebration. I didn't see a single pro-Trump post all day.
This is an example of "preference falsification". The energy (in "the ability of a system to do work" sense) of aptly-named social media is social pressure.
I'll push back against this. It seems to me that Facebook makes it more challenging for you to filter through that bubble. Their algorithms are tailored to get me to engage with the site and keep my session alive as long as possible. Not surprisingly, I'm sure that it will present me more with things that please me -- either things I agree with or people backlashing against things I disagree with -- than not. As a user, it seems it takes an extra level of awareness and conscious work on my part to fight against their ranking algorithms. It does not present to me a snapshot of my social network as it is; it presents me a snapshot of my social network that seeks to maximize its perceived relevance to me at any given moment. That isn't the same thing.
Having said that, I think it is too easy to fault them for this. I'm an educator, and I think the only meaningful weapon against this is educating people on the forces involved. I'm also painfully aware that as I write this, an enormous swath of my fb friends are asking to be "unfriended" by people they don't agree with, so I don't think fb engineers are the real source of our issues in that dimension.
facebook engineers optimize for ad revenue, not factual accuracy. this needs to be fixed. like pg said in the article, no idea how. education is important but there's simply too much information out there and it's hard to filter the important from the insignificant, not to mention truth from falsehood. there's a need for tech that could assist those tasks with minimal barrier to entry. problem is there's no market for this... yet.
What? People block that shit. Go outside and talk to a person at the grocery store if you want to burst your bubble.
News, ads, friend suggestions etc. are all designed to be as non-confrontational as possible. To fit into your world view so neatly you don't even know that your perception of reality outside of Facebook, when filtered through Facebook, is actually tailored to you.
yeah I disagree. there's NO place on the internet that forces you into another "bubble"... on reddit i can avoid r/all entirely... make a custom homepage... block users.. on twitter if someone bothers me i can block them... if i get tired of festival spunyons telling me how spiritual they are on facebook i can unfollow and remain friends... i can get browser plugins to block entire concepts and names... e.g. SO many people i know installed facebook purity just to block Trump or Clinton on facebook... posts, news, groups all that. I can block game invites (i do)... on top of the user options the algorithms are totally setup to provide me with content I will enjoy based on content I have marked as "affirmative" or "enjoyed".
with that being said... Facebook's feed is too influential but that's not facebook's fault. People want confirmation bias and the internet is prob best at providing it.
there are exceptions, trending topics... big stories always get through... but for example... on facebook I buy things from a lot of small business and now i know how they feel about politics and now one has the real hard choice of... do i unfollow and miss sales or do i tolerate the small annoyance... real soft struggle stuff.
The FB propaganda effect is easy to measure. Just look at how 'surprised' Dem Facebook were that Trump won, vs the same with Repub users.
The level of surprise should be identical among both groups, but that's very obviously not the case. Facebook feeding its users biased news isn't the only reason Trump won, but given how many hours per day folks spend on the site (compared with traditional media) it was clear a huge contributing factor.
Oh c'mon. Do you really believe Facebook is stacked with Republicans? Don't you remember the controversy over Facebook censoring conservative views? If anything, the company was pro-Clinton
Facebook's pro-Clinton bias is why Trump won. Clinton's supporters were completely insulated from reality, and many were celebrating their victory before the election even happened.
Damn! I'm seeing everywhere that many people "handed" this election to Trump. The man won it himself. Hillary is basically the worst case of homosapiens (always wrong side of history, supporter of bill cheater (i'm with bill etc)).
To be clear, I did not vote for Trump, but my rejection of his candidacy was certainly not based on the stance of the LA Times editorial board. To be honest, with the amount of biased and sloppy journalism I read from even the venerated newspapers like the LA and NY Times, I'm not sure why the author assumes anyone should listen to the suggestions of their respective editorial boards.