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What you are saying doesn't really add up. If the environment is really that hostile because Trump was elected, it should not be fostering movements like #MeToo. It should have crushed dissent. A wake up call doesn't lead to something like that. There has to be some positive factor being overlooked.


We're a constitutional republic, not an authoritarian regime regardless of how much current administration wishes otherwise.

Good guys need villains, they need them to have purpose, to have focus. Without that ability to focus catalysts for change never amount to much.


The comment my above comment is replying to literally compares Trump's America to Nazi Germany. How useful was Hitler as a means to empower the oppressed by giving them a villain for their public narrative?

I am well aware that sometimes negative events can be a catalyst for positive change, that sometimes they cast light on the problem and make it visible. But comments here indicate that people long knew about, for example, Weinstein's bad behavior. It fostered jokes, not a groundswell of public outcry.


I don't know if the movements were suddenly under attack. What is more clear to me is many became more overt and loud after Trump was elected. There was a sense of urgency and threat based on nothing other than what Trump and others like Bannon had said. Mind you, just said. Whether they were actual threats (or are) is definitely a legitimate (if separate) debate. Your causality is, however, arguing that the reverse happened: the opening shot came from the Trump side.

I don't think this discussion has much to do with the Facebook story above, however.

I think the question of news manipulation based on headlines[1] affects both the left and the right and happened to be facilitated by Facebook and its hungry data chewers. It's got to monetize that somehow, right?

Oh, and I remember when the Facebook IPO happened a bunch of buddies at a large investment bank argued that there was no way a platform like that had any value, etc. and so forth. And I remember arguing that the data they had had some value, we just don't know (and I didn't know) just for what, yet.

1 - https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511... <-- You all must read this!


Trump got 41% of the female vote.




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