> Sanders pieces took a negative tone by a ratio of 5 to 1, whereas opinion pieces on Clinton were about evenly split between favorable and unfavorable.
What is the baseline?
Also, these were clearly-identified opinion pieces. Fake news doesn't identify itself as such.
Here is an example of the exact reason Trump voters are so mysterious:
Nonsensical beliefs and faulty reasoning are deprecated (and ideally not represented at all) in any well informed clear thinking venue. Here that manifests, quite sensibly, by the downvote.
And any meritocracy would eventually eliminate nonsensical views entirely.
So the problem comes when a political movement harnesses nonsense while clear thinking people have systematical eliminated it entirely from their discourse. And after that movement's unexpected triumph, the clear thinkers try to understand what happened.
The Trump campaign exposed some serious problems with traditional newspaper reporting, which tries to be even-handed. This is based on the assumption that presidential candidates will generally be honest, and will generally base their arguments on facts. Trump broke that convention by basing his political career (starting with Birtherism) on lies, which led to "false equivalence" in the coverage.
In other words, serious reporting (as opposed to opinion pieces) treated lies as though they were truths. This could only be considered harmful.
There has been quite a lot of discussion around this. See, for example:
There's also the issue of false balance (Edit: which is the point of your links, actually, so I'm just stating explicitly). I think the media, in an attempt to appear more unbiased, has been more giving air to statements which are misleading or arguably not true. Politicians have noticed this and taken advantage of it. (This is independent of actual bias in the media.)
I can hear the arguments now: "Of course the MSM is going to say that! They're obviously biased against Trump! They're just representing their own selfish interest!"
Yup. A lot of media organizations endorsed Clinton over Trump.
I've been (admittedly amateurishly) looking for research on media bias. Research is limited by its methods, and researchers hold opinions, results can be subject to confirmation bias, so this whole area is difficult for the every day person to sift through.
I find it hard to believe that no bias exists, and I think a lot of journalists try to be objective, with varying success. The question to me is how much bias there is, how we can keep that in mind, and how we can agree on some shared understanding of facts.
It's also in the interest of these organizations to support the First Amendment. Hard to ask them to be against — or even neutral — the First Amendment, just as we'd expect for any business to support aspects of the Constitution or law that are in their own self interest (regardless of whether we agree with it).
It's also in the interest of Americans in general for strong First Amendment rights. It has broad support across parties. This kind of nuance doesn't fit easily in 140 characters or support the easy "us vs them" characterization.
> Yup. A lot of media organizations endorsed Clinton over Trump.
Pretty hard to endorse Trump, given that he's a crooked racist and narcissist, a sexual predator, a pathological liar, and wholly unqualified for any public office. Given what he said in his speeches, not many companies would even hire him.
As a result, even Republican newspapers broke with tradition and endorsed HRC, except for one Las Vegas paper owned by one of Trump's backers.
> I find it hard to believe that no bias exists, and I think a lot of journalists try to be objective, with varying success.
There's a strong bias towards getting the truth reported, which is why the leading newspapers have trained journalists, fact checkers, subeditors etc, plus ombudsmen to handle complaints.
If you have the facts then you can argue about causes and solutions, and you might have (say) a more Democratic or a more Republican approach to those. Those opinions may involve denying at least some of the facts, but people generally choose the outlets that suit their own opinions.
The problems start when news outlets no longer care about facts, like Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge etc. Fox actually argued in court that it wasn't obliged to tell the truth because it was an entertainment channel.
I am with you, friend. On reddit's /r/politics, there was a heavy influx of Correct The Record shills, and now that the election is over, things have returned to relatively normal there. With Bezos controlling WaPo, I have no reason to believe things are not being manipulated here as well. The only thing, and maybe good, this election cycle has done was throw out the window the small shred of faith I had in fair and unbiased reporting in this country in critical moments. They throw a puff piece, or a good piece of journalism here and there on side topics, but when it comes to crunch time -- as shown by the WaPo days leading up to the Democratic Primaries, they unleash the full weight of their propaganda machine with no remorse.
The only thing I'll turn to these corrupt giants now is weather events. Can't slant those in any way. We need to break up the 6 corporations that control our media, ASAP.
Discrediting honest reporting has been the foundation of the whole alt-right approach to the media, and getting acceptance for the lies broadcast by sources such as Breitbart News and Drudge Report. In fact, it's essential to discredit honest reporting if your lies are going to get any traction. And, evidently, it has worked on you.
Sadly, it's even worse than it sounds, because now even the alt-right websites can't tell the truth. For an interesting short piece about this, see the final section of "Donald Trump broke the conservative media" (1). Quote:
One of the chief problems, Sykes (2) said, was that it had become impossible to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past several decades, the conservative news media had "basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers."
"There's nobody," he lamented. "Let's say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it's a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, 'By the way, you know it's false.' And they'll say, 'Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.' Or they'll say, 'I saw it on a Facebook page.' And I'll say, 'The New York Times did a fact check.' And they'll say, 'Oh, that's The New York Times. That's bulls---.' There's nobody — you can't go to anybody and say, 'Look, here are the facts.'"
"And I have to say that's one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there's no way to break through it," Sykes continued. "And I swim upstream because if I don't say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they'll ask what's wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true."
What is the top news link, isn't part of the problem that what I see when I search for 'final election results' is different from what any one else would see, personalization, in other words?
I am able to reproduce, both incognito and signed into chrome. I'm guessing it's not personalized because the actual search is short circuited by a specialized result view, with Google's own "2016 US election results" widget appearing above the search listing.
Though ironically it's now been bumped to second by the WaPo article about it.
We were previously worried about filter bubbles -- that is, people only seeing true news that agreed with their worldviews. This election cycle we seem to have a rise in blatantly false news that agrees with people's worldviews spreading through social media. Everyone is talking about Facebook and Twitter fueling this problem, but it seems not even Google is immune. A healthy democracy relies on an informed citizenry, so this phenomenon is truly a threat to democracy itself.
If the propaganda is good enough, I don't think any amount of critical thinking will save you.
(For example, critical thinking has helped me to date — I believe — because it's not worth going after me as you only need 50% of the population to win an election. Just as it isn't worth trying to write a Nigerian scam email that's good enough to get me because there is plenty of lower-hanging fruit.)
I think we are talking about different levels of critical thinking. There is simple reading comprehension as in "I understand the argument you are making" but then there is also a higher version as in "I understand the argument you are making and have weighted it with this criteria"
Re-read the comment you responded to. I agreed with you. What is it that you think I am claiming? My only claim (admittedly that I am aware of) is that fake news would have a harder time having impact in a climate where people practiced more critical thinking than they do currently.
Are you not following this thread? We are talking about critical thinking wrt democracy. We got on this tangent because the first comment paraphrased the Jefferson quote: "If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."
I am assuming we are having this discussion on a more elevated level that obvious absurdities.
But even if you want to go down that road that I am pretty sure that there would be plenty of self correction happening unless you decided to stay isolated from the rest of the world right after you read that. Thats obviously not whats happening at all.
Forgive me if I am wrong... but didn't his political momentum mainly start with his very public lead role in the "birther movement"?
"Global Warming is a Chinese Hoax"
"Ted Cruiz's father killed JFK"
"Obama and Hillary founded ISIS"
Is it even possible to separate that man from misinformation?
Edit: I have anecdotal "evidence" that some of his voters where swayed by this stuff from conversations I have had with Trump supporters. While that isn't enough to make the claim that misinformation is the sole cause of his election (a claim btw, that I have not seen made on this thread.. you are the one that brought it up), it does show me that its impact was greater than 0.
You forget that people gravitate towards what they believe in already. They aren't sitting there evaluation who to believe in based on the facts out there.
I agree, but it doesn't discount it either, it simply means greater than 0. Its not enough to draw a conclusion from which is why I haven't. My only claim is that critical thinking would lessen the non-zero impact.
I am not ThomPete but if I had to guess, it's PC bias that blinded many to the potential of this outcome. Perhaps most glaring of these biases is the idea that all women should demonstrate solidarity for their gender and vote for a woman, even if it means voting against their own best interests and the interests of their communities. I don't see too many people calling that for what it really is: sexism.
If you're talking about the pollsters, which are not necessarily academics (bias much?), it seems like a stretch to say that making a prediction of a complicated future event based on statistical techniques is due to a lack of critical thinking. Their prediction models will have to be adjusted, sure. But all the people that were "proven" right because their intuition happened to match the outcome are using a much worse critical thinking technique.
No, I'm talking about all the columnists who openly refer to that 42% as traitors to their gender.
I did a Google search (ironic, I know) for "Trump traitor gender" and I couldn't find columnists referring to Trump-voting women as traitors to their gender. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but I think this illustrates the sort of problem we are faced with
Thanks, but that's a column that accuses feminists of the same thing that GP did. It isn't a column by a feminist accusing Trump voters of being gender traitors, although it does link to a single blog post on Slate http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/11/09/white_women_...
Perhaps that blogpost partially satisfies GP's assertion, but this little thread illustrates how difficult it is to fact-check political rhetoric, even in the absence of fake news.
I do agree that you should be able to back up your assertions with some sources. As GP asserts, we all have our little bubbles of bias that seem incomprehensible to the rest, as we focus and magnify issues that are important to us.
In the interest of going forward instead of just arguing back and forth about sources, I looked for a few. Disclaimer: I am generally anti-feminist in my views. For reproducibility's sake, I used combinations of the following search terms: feminism, white women, trump, internalized misogyny, we need to talk, intersectionality. I also added tl;drs to each link but don't consider them canonical.
I didn't find enough posts outright calling women "gender traitors". I don't believe that is the most common feminist MO - they are more likely to blame "internalized misogyny" and "white women abandoning the sisterhood"(I guess that's close enough?), which are both long-standing narratives among feminism(feminists vs non-feminists, and the internal racial divide).
The rage I found was mostly on Twitter, feeding into my preconceived notion that Twitter is cancerous to actual discussion. Here's a quick twitter dump to illustrate:
Past the twitter outrage, the articles I found were a lot more analytical and introspective. Like I said, the most common themes were "white women betraying the sisterhood", and women in general "suffering" from "internalized misogyny":
Someone is flagged & dead in this thread for daring to suggest that Meliana Trump might end up as first lady. Another (also flagged/dead) response called them a "poll truther" for that comment.
A lot of people want to blame "bad polling" for this, but they were biased towards Obama turnout numbers, which didn't happen, and ignored the fact that Trump was filling rallies and Hillary wasn't. Or how being viewed as a Trump supporter can be completely unsafe: See also:
An interesting observation about the HN thread that you linked to, is that the most substantive reply, that pointed out that Trump was sitting at a real, 25% chance of winning was not voted down.
But neither was the post saying "I have visions of Bill, passed out in a hammock on the White House lawn, surrounded by empties and cheeto packets." voted down, so that would tend to weigh against it being purely a matter of being a comment with no substance.
I'd say that it appears that people believed it was the type of political falsehood we're talking about here. I mean, it did say 'more than likely' so anyone who believed the 98-99% estimates should have considered it laughably false based on the evidence they knew. The other comment made a more specific, factual claim that couldn't be laughed off, though I saw many stories aghast that 538 would break ranks.
I can't find a source, but in part the consistency of the polls reminds me of the stories of how the measurements of some physical constant (g?) drifted over time because everyone felt beholden to the 'consensus' value, which was wrong. I wish I could find that, I think I saw it on HN a long time ago.
Obviously, it's 'safest' to use the same assumptions everyone else did. When 538 broke from the herd, a lot of people questioned them on it. Based on the results, they were at least 30+% more correct than the 99%ers. And I think all of them were operating on assumptions that have been invalidated.
I agree and wish there were more 'viewpoint diversity' in academia, in addition to gender, racial, and cultural diversity. Social sciences should allow for more freedom of thought without fear of being ostracized. There is a reason why academia is a polarizing environment: personal ideologies of social psychologists can influence how the topic is studied. As such, for example, conservatives have little influence in the scholarly disciplines. Less that 10% of professors in these fields identify as conservative [1].
I hope more institutions can look at viewpoint diversity more closely [2].
If by "bias" you mean the systemic blindness against the polling data showing the possibility of a Trump win, I agree with you.
But if you are implying that having a strongly-held political opinion is "bias", then I disagree. The idea that academics, or anyone else should be perfectly neutral (if that's your implication) doesn't really make sense.
Idk if you write code or not, but if you don't think critical thinking is good in general when dealing with unknowns (such as when making a decision on a democratic vote), then I bet your debug sessions are hilarious to observe.
Yep. If you elaborate perhaps I will get exactly what it is you are trying to say. Are you trying to say "Critical thinking is hard and easy to mess up?" If so, then sure, I can see that. I just wish it was more of a thing in our culture...something that regular people regularly talked about.
What I am saying is that critical thinking doesn't have a lower boundary. It will always be subject to the premise we base something on.
A voter who doesn't have a job because of ex. globalization isn't going to apply the same critical thinking of a voter who is doing well and is benefitting from globalization.
We are all trapped by our frames of reference, no amount of critical thinking is going to change that and just because you know of critical thinking you aren't going to make better decisions.
Furthermore there are plenty of people who understand and apply critical thinking. What is really missing is constructive thinking but thats another thing all together.
True critical thinking involves the frequent re-examination of one's starting premises in the light of new input. Every time I gain some new insight or information, I become that much more likely to question my basic assumptions about, well, anything. It is a great error, upon finding a demonstrably correct solution to a problem, to assume that its correctness is everlasting. If it later turns out that the conclusion was correctly reasoned from incomplete information, it is all too easy to reject new and contradictory information because it would invalidate the conclusion, even though the conclusion in question was drawn without access to the new information.
Which is why access to a competent education is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy.
In my opinion, we aren't there yet since there are huge disparities between education quality across the public school system. One solution (IMO) is to standardize funding; today school districts rely on local funding which can result in tremendous funding disparities (and by extension, disparities in education quality).
While I agree in general, critical thinking alone is inadequate if there isn't enough information or information pathways are constricted such that they deliver only biased viewpoints.
Critical thinking is orthogonal to intelligence, imo. Which is why I think it should be taught with the same importance as reading and math. Perhaps it is a tautology, but as far as I know its the ONLY thing that could save you from a clever piece of false propaganda.
The implicit solution you're suggesting would curtail the First amendment. That's a bigger threat to democracy than a misinformed populace IMHO. What we really need are annotations that are community driven. A "bs meter" if you will.
Sure, "Google" as a private entity can curtail freedom of speech on its platform. It becomes less clear when Facebook, Twitter, and Google are effectively public goods.
Except they're pretty clearly private companies, not Public Goods. And as such, they can do basically whatever they want about speech on their platforms.
At which point does a service offered by a private company become a public good? There was such a transitioning point for electric power, for telephone service, etc. Will it occur for social media? And if so, at which point?
You misread the parent. It was not arguing that the government can't restrict Google's speech. It was arguing that Google can restrict speech on its platform, which is true.
The government I think could possibly use the commerce clause to impose obligation on a corporation certify its ranking algorithms which could lead to some extremely fun results.
A law that prevents google algorithm to (not)take truthiness into account would probably be constitutional.
how would that work any differently than share flag/report? People share when it confirms their bias, and flag/report when they dislike something.
Let's say identical articles get published in Huffington Post and Breitbart (since most journalism is reposting AP/Reuters/Youtube/Imgur/Twitter with a h/t at the end anyway, its not unbelievable.)
The HP article gets shared by the left-bubble and spreads rapidly. Now if The left-internet catches wind of a controversial Breitbart article, they attack. In left-internet the Breitbart article will perish, the HP, flourish.
Because there are 55 hundred million versions of the same article posted across thousands of sources, there are always variants of each story that exhibit each behavior in each community.
I thought it was weird that people would create fake news, but I just realized that it's all about getting clicks/ad views.
If Facebook/Google instituted a policy of denying ad payouts to fake news (assuming that could be reliably determined) then the problem would correct itself. Of course, content creators would argue that it's "entertainment" and that "no one really believes it" but that's another issue. :)
Couldn't you monetise fake news that's visible enough to make Google/Facebook do that by charging whoever benefits politically from it? Assuming you can convince them you can do it over and over maybe they'd pay you to keep going or stop?
>>I thought it was weird that people would create fake news
Story time...
The very first class I took in college was called Information Fluency, back in 2002. Among other things, it taught HTML and CSS (which I already knew) and then the professor did something really interesting for the capstone project, which was to have everyone create a fake website containing some big news and host it on its own domain (which weren't so easy to get back then). The more real-looking you made it, the higher your score. So you quickly learned to pay attention to little things such as copyright notices in footers, professional-looking logos, professional-sounding domain names, static pages for stuff like "organization history" and whatnot.
The best part though? As extra credit, the teacher sent everyone a list of ten links, which were either the fake websites created by other students, or real websites. If you were able to correctly distinguish the fake ones from the real ones, you earned the extra credit! So your overall score was a function of how well you fooled others, and how likely you yourself were to be fooled. :)
I got the highest score in that class. Mine was a website belonging to some fake space agency called Interstellar Space Sciences, and it was reporting on its front page that scientists had found trace of alien life on Mars. The story had fake citations from real people working at real organizations, as well as high-quality photos of what looked like the Martian landscape (actually Death Valley in California that I applied a reddish color filter to) and diagrams of organic molecules. I also had a "Contact Us" page where I listed my phone number, which several people actually called! For a period of three weeks I just answered all calls with, "Good afternoon, Interstellar Space Sciences, how may I direct your call?" and everyone fell for it, including some of my actual friends...
Anyway, I think my experiences in that class turned me into a super skeptic, and from then on I started to take all incoming information with a grain of salt, especially if it is reported in the news.
Nobody thought of checking company registration records, press releases or how long the domain had been active? I mean, I get the main point and I know in practice very few people will go to those lengths for a random site, but given you were given a list known to contain false sites... well, checking for incorporation documents, street address registration and legal contact sounds time effective.
> If Facebook/Google instituted a policy of denying ad payouts to fake news (assuming that could be reliably determined) then the problem would correct itself.
Only in some cases: consider how much money is spent on political advertising, and then all of the second-order work funding think-tanks, newspapers, magazines, TV networks, etc. to promote a particular viewpoint. I wouldn't classify Reason as a fake news source but they're an example of what that might look like. Here are their IRS filings from 2015 showing ~90% of their operating income coming from donations:
What happens if one or two of their major donors decides this isn't the most effective way to support their viewpoint and they'd get more return at the polls by setting up a less ethical site?
How many Google Ads could you buy for $9M/year, and how quickly would that translate into organic page-rank? Now consider that Presidential campaign spending has been in the billion-plus range for awhile and ask how many activist donors would be totally comfortable dropping tens of millions for a couple of years to run a fake site if they thought it'd be more effective than a few more TV ads.
Although the portrayal of all foreign media with a different narrative than the US media as "weaponized disinformation" could also be an example of information warfare.
Isn't it true that every for every Age -- Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Information Age, etc. -- the age identifies the dominant material used in making weapons at the time?
Absolutely and US media is doing it for a long time. Afghan fighters were (see Rambo) great freedom fighters i.e Mujahideen . A decade later same Mujahideen became top villains of cinema and media.
Same goes for weapons of mass destruction. Media just supported bogus claims of Bush administration to sway public support to invade Iraq.
Latest of all is ISIS - It's very hard to believe that American Military who monitors almost entire world failed to monitor a high risk area for such a long time that 30,000 strong army was able to train and arm itself to such an extent that they were able to defeat trained armies.
Not that I disagree that Soviets and Russians run propoganda machines.
But the atlantic article itself reads like a propoganda.
There are ethnic russians who speak russian living as the majority group in a region called novorussia less than 150 years ago. None of that is false. Why not conduct a plebiscite there? These people will shit on India for kashmir or Israel for Palestine, but will turn a blind eye towards other areas. Propoganda it is too.
Take Novorossiya, the name Vladimir Putin has given to the huge wedge of southeastern Ukraine he might, or might not, consider annexing. The term is plucked from tsarist history, when it represented a different geographical space.
Then they link a yandex search for, what the context suggests, should be contemporary Novorossiya maps produced by Russian propaganda. But they seem to match this map, uploaded to Wikipedia five years before the Crimean invasion:
> There are ethnic russians who speak russian living as the majority group in a region called novorussia less than 150 years ago. None of that is false. Why not conduct a plebiscite there? These people will shit on India for kashmir or Israel for Palestine, but will turn a blind eye towards other areas. Propoganda it is too.
I can speak about Kashmir and why plebiscite will not be a fair thing to do. Kashmiris now consists of Muslim majority as a result of systematic culling. This was not the case in 1970. With external support, an Ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus was carried out for decade and Media kept silent. In fact Indian Government itself was the culprit. In its policy of minority appeasement, they completely ignored mass culling of Hindu population.
Well, everyone is talking about Facebook and Twitter fuelling this problem amongst people whose views they disagree with, anyway. Much fewer people are willing to admit the same problem exists on their own side. In fact, you could probably tell most people's political positions based on which fake news they complain about.
To expand on this a little more, I think traditional media is also quite often deceptive or wrong.
The example that really opened my eyes was the reporting in the NYT running up to the Iraq war, during which they falsely reported Saddam Hussain had large stockpiles of WMDs.
Right, which is the story everyone cites when it comes to mainstream media failure. I think it's telling that this example is over a decade old now.
I'm not saying that mainstream media outlets report incorrectly at times - they do - but they are dragged over the coals for it, repeatedly. This new generation of Facebook-only news pages are so numerous that they are never called out loudly and clearly.
The most recent would be everyone getting the polls wrong by assuming Obama turnouts and ignoring the enthusiasm gap at the rallies. To his credit, Nate Silver realized we were just 'one normal polling error away from electing Trump' only to get attacked for not showing 98-99% odds of Clinton as you can read here:
There's a reasonable range of disagreement. But a model showing Clinton at 98% or 99% is not defensible based on the empirical evidence.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
But again, it's not as if this isn't being called out. Including, as you're saying, by the media itself. And these aren't cases of deliberate deception - they're faulty reporting. Surely that is inevitable every now and then.
The posts seem on the Facebook pages many people forward are knowingly incorrect. And they're not getting called out. It's a whole new ball game.
It's politics. How can you assume that they know they're incorrect? And sure, it's being called out now, but that's only because of the election results.
Anything you do to suppress information will trigger the Streisand Effect. Any censorship of it will be routed around because this is the internet.
The cure for bad speech has always been more speech.
That's because it's a really critical media failure -- we're still grappling today with the consequences of invading Iraq.
A more recent media failure would be the Rolling Stone campus-rape article.
You're right – and it's a good point – that there are a lot of trash "news" sites being passed around on facebook that are obviously completely bogus, and no one ever bothers to debunk them.
But I don't see it as much more of threat to democracy than the sometimes-right, sometimes-pushing-an-agenda mainstream media we've had since forever.
When people rail against facebook (essentially a communication tool) "allowing" these fake news articles to proliferate, what they're essentially saying is people should only be allowed to share with their friends official "truth", as decided by some arbitrary third party.
That, to me, seems much scarier and like more of a threat to democracy.
Everyone in a democracy is informed, there is no such thing as uninformed voters per se.
So depending on how you define informed citizenry I don't think you are right. And I believe that way too much importance is being put on the fake news effect. It has nothing to do with why people voted like they did. If anything EVERYONE is living in a filter bubble and have been doing that since the dawn of man.
The voters who voted for Trump or Hillary were informed enough to make a choice because they voted on what they experience in their everyday. Thats the whole idea.
The idea isn't that someone dictates what it means to be informed (i know you didn't say specifically but you seem to imply something along those line)
News fake or not isn't what drive most peoples decisions and I would ask you to ask yourself if you changed your opinion on something that was you found out was fake. My guess is you didn't even when you thought it was right.
What factually correct information are you talking about exactly? Both sides have biases if nothing else about the other side.
The whole idea with a democracy is that no one get to decide what is important to voters and so no one get to decide what they need to be informed about.
Politics about prioritization it's NOT an academic discipline. People who voted for Trump did so because of what they felt was important just like voters for Hillary did on her.
Who are you or I to say what information is the right information to judge based on?
Politics should be about prioritization. But unfortunately, it's often about facts.
For example, the climate change debate should be about how much effort to put into fighting it, whether regulatory or market-based solutions are more appropriate, etc. Instead, the debate is about whether it's even happening at all.
If we can't even agree on basic facts, what hope is there of choosing effective leadership?
Huh? Politics are never about facts not sure where you get that idea about it's about perception, power etc. Not about facts. Thats why it's called the art of the possible.
You prove my very point. Your believe that the priority should be about how we should fight it. Thats your prioritization. You don't even have to be a climate sceptic to come up with another perspective which is. You don't need to worry about that, technology will solve it.
Agreeing on the basic facts has absolutely nothing to do with politics. Because even the basic facts aren't what drives politics decision making.
I said that the climate change debate should be about how much effort to put into fighting it. "Zero" is a perfectly acceptable answer to that question (albeit one I disagree with).
The problem isn't that people are arguing that "zero" is the correct answer to the question. The problem is that we lack a shared basis of facts, to the extent that about half of the electorate will say that the question itself is based on false assumptions.
The problem is that even when it comes to climate it's not even sure people accept that it's an important fact to worry about. Thats what I am trying to say.
There is not right prioritization here. Only the one people make. Thats democracy.
I agree with your second paragraph. There is no right prioritization, only different ones.
But there are right facts. And if the basis of someone's prioritization is "climate change isn't even happening, so of course we shouldn't do anything to fight it" then I think it's reasonable to call that position uninformed.
The problem isn't that some people think it's unimportant. The problem is that many people think it's not even real.
Of course there are right facts, the point is that there are right facts on both sides of the argument.
I.e. you can be as educated liberal as you want that does not mean that the facts you care about are more important than the facts som uneducated trump supporter cares about.
How people prioritize issues based on facts is different from whether the facts are true. I agree that you or I can disagree on prioritization of issues. People can also be wrong about which facts they believe. For example, if someone believes that New York City is the capital of the state of New York, they're factually wrong. They're misinformed.
For a more political fact, Barack Obama either was or was not born in the US. People made political decisions based on whether or not this is true. For the argument I'm making, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. It's that a fact is politically important.
If you're arguing that which facts are true is ultimately relative, I'm not going to chase you down that particular rabbit hole.
Perhaps what I'm saying is obvious and trivial to you, and we're speaking past each other.
What I disagree with is whether they impact the voters as has been claimed (not necessarily by you) and which I believe is the base of this whole thread here.
The critical thinking only help you based on your premise it doesn't give you the "right" premise IMO.
I don't have some super secret agenda. 2) is just as it says. And by the rest, "Whats important is which facts impact them. I.e. the facts that a Trump voter cares about vs. the ones that a Hillary voter cares about.", I think you agree with 3).
My reaction is solely on the idea that people can't believe facts that aren't true, that they can't be misinformed, and that the news plays no role in misinforming them.
This goes back to
"Everyone in a democracy is informed, there is no such thing as uninformed voters per se...
News fake or not isn't what drive most peoples decisions
"
The news is a source of information/facts for people. Some of those facts may be false, and people may believe facts that aren't true. People who believe facts that aren't true are uninformed/misinformed.
Perhaps a source of misunderstanding is I'm making little distinction between uninformed and misinformed, equating for these purposes misinformed and uninformed of the truth regarding a fact they accept. I do agree that people are subject to confirmation bias, fitting facts to what they believe more often than not. Jonathan Haidt's elephant/rider metaphor seems apt as well. This seems in line with your statements on how facts influence views.
I had to look up false consciousness. While I do think there are misinformation and disinformation campaigns (which is what some campaigning seems to be reduced to, nowadays), I don't subscribe to some purposeful, widespread, institutional, systemic propaganda machine. Some may argue that I'm likely just naïve.
By the way, I'm trying to reach some shared understanding. I'm not arguing for the sake of argument or just trying to argue against whatever you happen to say. I hope that's clear :) I don't think we're actually all that far off in opinion, if at all. Perhaps we're just prioritizing different parts of the equation.
Thanks for sticking with this by the way, and remaining civil. I'm sure you've noticed as well how off the rails a lot of these discussions can go.
Tell me about it :) I am getting down voted like a mofo. Really wish downvotes had to be accompanied by a comment so I could at least understand why.
Anyway yeah I think we are agreeing more than disagreeing.
My original point is just an objection to this idea that if only people were better educated we wouldn't have people voting for Trump. Thats not whats actually said but it's in there between the lines.
The reality is that we all have our different perspectives and are all right about things and wrong about other things.
That you are well educated and have learned critical thinking does not make you a critical thinker and that you are not less likely to be misinformed just because you are better educated and have learned about critical thinking.
In some ways although it might be a stretch I would argue that being aware of critical thinking makes you more likely to venture outside areas that you know about because you believe that your critical thinking is going to save you.
If this election underlined something once again for me it is that being educated and understanding what critical thinking is doesn't make you immune for that misinformation.
> Keep in mind many of the people who voted in Trump also voted in Obama.
Evidence that this meets any reasonable definition of many voters? Even in the states that flipped, the numbers aren't such that mathematically many (or even any) voters need to have switched that direction. There's probably some, but I haven't seen any indictation in any source that suggests substantial numbers.
Nothing in that article makes the case (there's a subhead which assumes it, but all the details talk about counties, not people.) With new voters coming of age, old voters dying, far less than 100% turnout so even of the people who could vote in both elections those who actually do might not be the same, counties can switch without people switching.
So, yeah, I'm sure there are some Obama/Trump voters, but I haven't seen a coherent case that there are a lot, just generous application of the fallacy of division.
Unless you have evidence that somehow those areas changed voters then I don't see what exactly you are questioning. 1/3 of Mexicans voted on Trump, Hillary only got 10% more female voters. Nothing indicates that the voters changed completely from one election to another.
Much is made of voter anger this election, but what if a larger factor turns out to be social media designed to inflame anger and fear? Inflaming emotions equals clicks equals profit.
This was one of the big features of Blekko, the curated list of sites that was considered 'news' were in the news slashtag, and searching for news only gave you results from those sites.
That is absolutely an editorial bias on the part of a search engine and Blekko was pretty up front about it. Similarly health queries would land on actual medical doctor written web sites rather than "fake" medical information sites.
But this is the thing, we would get complaints that we were "suppressing the truth" because conspiracy theorists and alternate medicine devotees would argue we did not provide results in line with their notion of the truth.
You can't really argue against that point of view, while you can disagree with it, a person's "ground truth" is often unique to them and their social circle. Thus if you want to serve your customer you need to support their desire to see the world through their own lens. But if you don't know who your customer is you can't really predict what their lens should be (that old "don't collect data on me!" principle which Blekko also followed). It makes for an interesting place to be.
That said, since Bing manages to weed out the fake news sites apparently so in that regard they have a higher search quality score than Google on this query. And websites that use their index benefit from that as well.
Is this phenomenon new? No, but suddenly everybody noticed[1]. Is there any actual data backing the claim that XYZ voters were tricked by a clikbait into which candidate to vote?!
Should Google, Facebook and Twitter turn into clickbait-vetting institutions? No, we should educate citizens instead to make better decisions and I don't mean voting for Hillary makes you an educated voter just because someone said so.
[1] This discussion is borderline ridiculous. Would we have this discussion if Ms Clinton had won the election? I doubt it. The DNC should do some introspection, stop asking how did we lose this election and start asking why did we lose this election, accept in democracies upsets happen and stop this insane witch hunt and get their shit together because we entire world is going to need them.
Unfortunately, I do not have any data, only my own experiences. I have spent much of the past year debunking countless fake news stories posted to Facebook by people I know. Many of them with college degrees.
I was told several times that Snopes is a liberal/democrat operative and has been proven to be wrong in the past. When requested, I was never provided with cases where Snopes was has been wrong. I was also told that PolitiFact.com was started and run by the Clinton campaign.
These "news" articles got even worse with the Podesta emails. It's easy for the blatantly false alt-right sites like InfoWars to make up stories and then these click-farming sites run those stories with even more sensational headlines. This was the case I saw with the "Spirit cooking" and claims that the Clinton camp was really a pedophile ring (using an email chain referencing kids in a swimming pool as "entertainment" as proof. In context, the emailer was someone speaking of bringing their own 3 kids to the party)
I don't know if these people were tricked, or if they were willfully ignorant because these "news" stories mad them feel justified in their preexisting hatred of all things democrat, liberal, and Clinton.
Yes, this, so much. Thank you. It was absolutely "weaponized disinformation," and Stephen Bannon is a homegrown USA adherent of it, and now he's Trump's right hand man in the White House.
People who should know better STILL believe that the reason Clinton lost is that she really is "corrupt." "She is corrupt because of the email leak." The emails I read seemed extremely banal ("Should we be bad and get a latte?"), even inspiring in some cases (Chelsea communicating about the Haiti earthquake response). I never saw anything concrete that made sense to me come out of that, and I spent a good amount of time looking into it, including reading through the text of emails which had been cherry-picked as being supposedly "damning." Getting together with "elite" people is not in and of itself proof of corruption: how could she do her work as First Lady, Secretary of State, and Senator, without that?
Ranting about "corruption" is one of the tricks of demagogues. Just read this Wikipedia article and tell me that is not a spot on description of what we are witnessing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue
It is so, so very tragic. People have still not realized what has happened. People are calming down when they should be panicking. The implications of this episode, just for our prospects of surviving Climate Change, are tragic.
I really worry about the spread of false information. I see more and more people telling me things IRL that (I think) they get on misinformation websites or Facebook posts. Many people (specially older ones) are not used to check the information that is presented to them.
Funny, I would qualify as old but I'm of exactly the opposite opinion. Young people are not used to paying for content (newspapers, anyone?) and do not realize free content cannot pay for high quality journalism and thus only provides superficial information.
I think what the parent poster implied was that older people who aren't very technologically savvy, as in the kind who would define Facebook as "the internet", don't appreciate how easy it is to publish materials online and so they give any old bullshit that shows up in their feed more credit than it deserves. I believe this might be because they understand publishing on mediums like television and newspapers is hard and requires capital, so they assume that must be true of the internet also. This is in contrast to a younger audience that is more technologically savvy and understands how easy it is to publish and propagate information.
But it's dangerous to generalize. I know a lot of older people who are incredibly technologically savvy and younger people who only care about the narcissistic and quick-consumption facets of technology.
I have found personally that those who are worst at believing and forwarding misinformation online are in their late 40s and 50s-young enough to use technology, but old enough to have not learned how to deal with a deluge of information.
This doesn't apply to all older people, of course. But on aggregate, I would agree with you.
18th-Century news pamphlets were the primary way of getting news and were often full of scurrilous, false information and nakedly partisan. So I'm not sure I can see this as some sort of new and unprecedented problem.
I think like with a lot of technology it isn't the novelty, but the scale. Operating a printing press and physically distributing false items is much harder than posting a tweet and letting it go viral.
What can Google do to prevent this from happening?
If Google really wants to organize the worlds information and make it usable for everybody, they have to make sure Google news is a news source you can trust. Pagerank is not going to cut it.
A couple of suggestions:
- prevent less reputable websites from showing up for political queries at all
- ignore articles with headlines in ALL CAPS
- work with a dedicated team of editors, like politifact, to give websites an honestyrank
- be transparent, show honesty rank in the search results
A start would not let anything that is run on Wordpress or Tumblr become the top news result for something. That's where most of the spam/fake websites seem to be these days.
I assume you mean your site runs on a Wordpress back-end, but in the case of this article the dodgy 70 News site is literally running on Wordpress.com's free hosting (it's 70news.wordpress.com). I suspect that's what the original poster meant since they mentioned Tumblr as well.
I have the opposite question: what did Google do in order to allow this to happen in the first place?
I thought the "news" results were supposed to be at least vaguely curated, and weren't just another way to show results from the entire web. How did 70news.wordpress.com end up in Google's list of "news" sites?
It showed up under "news" for me. Not anymore, though. I assume they've fixed it.
Edit: actually, it's still there if I use a desktop browser. It's on the main results page, but in the "in the news" section, not just in the main results.
What can Google do to prevent this from happening?
Actually very little. A strong argument can be made that market forces dictate people want their false opinions confirmed, and if you fail to provide that they will stop using your service.
It is really no different then losing trust. If you assume a service as a bias, like say promoting an agenda you disagree with. You may start using that service less and less. Google combats this with individual search preferences. So it's search results rarely leave your internet safe space.
If you promote a honesty index you lose this safe guard. Suddenly search results will challenge people's opinions, and they may stop using the service.
If we're calling this "fake" news because the facts being reported are actually lies then you're implying that people want to be lied to. I happen to think there is some truth to that but I doubt people would be willing to explicitly say "I want to be lied to by the news" as would be required for anyone to really complain about Google leaving fake news sites out of search results.
That memo says nothing at all about censoring searches based on political party. It suggests working with technology companies to make good use of their beta programs and new platform features, which is something you can do yourself. Adding a scary wikileaks link shouldn't make your point for you
The link does not apply to the first point. Google censoring searches for Hillary's health for example is well documented. Re the second one, if I DON'T add a Wikileaks link then you'll complain the information is not sourced. So here's a more comprehensive one then:
I am not seeing a smoking gun here, really the evidence presented is completely circumstantial and does not seriously support your assertion that Google is working directly with the Democratic Party. Yes, Eric Schmidt is a political operative now, and generally a lobbyist on behalf of Google. However the scare quote, about building a unified profile of a voter, absolutely does not indicate any data sharing between Google and the Clinton campaign!
It's really sketchy of zero hedge to suggest that. Reading another article of theirs shows the same pattern. Leave the reader to make their own incorrect conclusions without providing any context. The article I'm seeing shows them quoting Putin who says that the west should allow for open discussion on all issues, instead of cracking down on his propaganda networks operating in the west. What hypocrisy! Russian media is one of the least free in the world! Zero hedge just lets him have the final word on their article, the reader left nodding his head in agreement with that Putin who tells the west how it really is. Disgusting.
Politifact is biased in favor of truth and honest reporting. For which reason it has won a Pulitzer Prize and many other awards for outstanding journalism.
Of course, people who don't want to hear the truth -- most Trump supporters, in my experience -- will deny reality or will try to undermine it in non-truthful ways.
As a matter of fact, there are several other honest fact-checking sites besides Politifact. It would be somewhat interesting if these disagreed with Politifact's judgments, but they don't.
Which claims they consider worthy of examination, whether they choose to interpret the claims in a more or less favourable light, which figures they choose as their measure of things like inflation, and how important they consider any inaccuracies to the overall claim all act as thumbs on the scale.
For example, I don't think they touched the claim that Trump has a secret communication channel with Russia, even though Clinton repeated it and demanded the FBI investigate it. (It was actually an entirely ordinary bulk email server sending out ads for Trump hotels.) A lot of people still seem to believe that one and think the FBI's rejection of it is proof they were conspiring to elect Trujmp.
They cover a lot, and they covered several with reference to Trump's ties to Russia. See below for some examples.
Either way, it's certainly true that Trump repeatedly praised Putin, quoted Russian propaganda, disbelieved US intelligence about Russian hacking (it might have been an obese guy in a basement) and did nothing to disprove his links with Russia. This included being too scared to show his tax returns, which hasn't happened since Nixon.
At least when you elected Nixon, you didn't know he was a crook.
Do you think that sneering at people who have an issue with PolitiFact is going to win them over to your side? Gonna be a long eight years if that's the case.
Putting aside sneering, though: let's assume for the sake of argument that PolitiFact really is neutral. And Google hires them to put a trustworthiness rating next to news search results. How many days pass before $YOUR_LEAST_FAVORITE_POLITICAL_FORCE realizes that PolitiFact is a single point of failure and starts scheming to influence it? Put it another way, they may be neutral today, but that's hardly a guarantee they'll be neutral tomorrow.
> they may be neutral today, but that's hardly a guarantee they'll be neutral tomorrow.
Doesn't work like that. Politifact takes a consensus of people who are experts in the topic, and its answers are subject both to peer review and to corrections from outside sources.
> Do you think that sneering at people who have an issue with PolitiFact is going to win them over to your side?
I'm damned sure that neither facts nor rational arguments are going to win them over, because they have been conned by a pathological liar. And as I pointed out above, he's a liar who has been supported by a lying alt-right media.
They live in the same sort of truth-free alternate reality as the whackjobs who believe in con-trails, think the moon landings were faked, believe Obama was born in Kenya, and don't believe in evolution.
As the judge in the Trump University fraud case pointed out: "victims of con artists often sing the praises of their victimizers until the moment they realize they have been fleeced".
> Politifact takes a consensus of people who are experts in the topic, and its answers are subject both to peer review and to corrections from outside sources.
And who decides which experts get to join the consensus, and which outside sources that proffer corrections should be listened to? You're dreaming if you think that a single-point-of-failure institution like this can ever be immune to the equivalent of regulatory capture.
> I'm damned sure that neither facts nor rational arguments are going to win them over, because they have been conned by a pathological liar. And as I pointed out above, he's a liar who has been supported by a lying alt-right media.
Yeah, see, that's the thing. We started at "We need a neutral, unbiased source of fact-checking!" and have reached the conclusion of "Because that'll help stick it to the people I hate!" In which case, one wonders how much "neutral, unbiased" was ever in the cards in the first place.
I would say Google has quite a task on their hand, and that truth-in-news recognition is much further behind than even facial recognition, which does not work in the wild.
Be fair I didn't read the article. Just judging by the site, the headline, and current events, I assume the problem is that the content of the page is opinion instead of fact.
Ok, what's wrong with that? If that site/blog post has gained more traffic, social signals, backlinks, etc. etc than it's "competitors" shouldn't it naturally be top ranking?
That's not what the article is about. It's about misinformation; the fact that people are citing these sites and touting numbers that "prove" that Hilary lost on both electoral and popular vote.
> touting numbers that "prove" that Hilary lost on both electoral and popular vote.
Which is moot point until someone can scientifically prove the person who's calculations showed Hillary losing the popular vote are indeed inaccurate, correct?
What gives you the impression that it's opinion and not fact? The article in question is making a factual claim, it just happens to be completely wrong.
It's like googling "moon landing date" and the first hit is a page that sincerely argues "the moon landing never happened."
Not in the "news" section. The complaint isn't that it's the first hit in the regular search results, it's that it's the first hit under news. (Or rather, it was. Now this Washington Post piece is first, and the false article is second!)
I've been wondering about that for some months now: for all the stuff I see reported as news, I'm increasingly suspicious about how any of it comes into being as reported.
What's funny, is now this article is the top result for "final election results" on Google. :) And then the article they're talking about shows up second.
Kind of surprising...as I remember it back in 2013 working at a news startup, getting listed in Google News seemed like a manual, hand-curated process. Not perfect, but frictiony enough to block this kind of crap
edit: by "manual", I only know what it was like on the news outlet side. You had to fill out a form, provide a real address and phone for contact info among other bits of company info, and the wait was several days if not a week. It felt like the process one goes through when a human has to verify the info, like an iOS app.
Question is: what constitutes "correct"? The Federal Elections Commission hasn't released the official results.
Google does (in light gray) mention that there's still 20 electoral votes to account for. It does not, however, give any disclaimer to the very precise looking "popular vote" count[1], which will change significantly when those 20 EVs are finally accounted for, and change again if[1] more counting occurs. A whole lot of arguing is going on over that popular vote, which indications are actually puts Trump ahead even though Clinton is authoritatively presented by Google as having more. No major site is showing Trump having the 306 EVs which he will undoubtedly have; the stalling at this point is getting suspicious.
[1] - To clarify: the USA presidential election does not establish a winner from the straight count of all voters. Since we are the United States, voters in each state vote in their jurisdiction, the state decides how to handle the results, and then each state submits a set of votes (weighted by population in a way to ensure low-population states aren't invariably washed out by a dozen major cities elsewhere). We don't necessarily complete the vote count because, mathematically, there comes a point (usually) where the remaining votes simply don't matter (say, candidate T is ahead by 200,000 votes and there are 100,000 votes remaining to count) because the allocation of the state's electoral votes are provably complete (and because counting every vote usually gets pretty messy at the end; look up "hanging chad").
They're offering up AP's count, but if the results below Knowledge Graph are fake, the best Google can offer is "trust that Google is right on the top section". Given that the first search result is so wrong, it's hard to trust Google in this regard.
Also, consider Google often tries to answer questions based on text from high-ranking results. So while final election results may get you the Knowledge Graph section, asking a specific question about the election results may inadvertently cause Google to source it's answer from a bad link like 70news.
There seems to be a lot of focus on the popular vote and the fact that Clinton won the popular vote but lost the presidency. But is it really useful to look at the popular vote for a close elections like this? I feel like people's behavior would change if the metric to elect the president was solely based on the popular vote. Many people that live in very red or very blue states feel like their vote "doesn't matter" and are not enthusiastic to vote. Not to mention campaigning strategies would be very different. We don't really know how the election would go under a popular vote scenario. It seem kind of disingenuous - like focusing on strikes out in a baseball game instead of the score.
It is important to look at it to get a sense of how strong of a mandate the party in power should claim. Given the current statistics, it's clear Trump's mandate is particularly weak; if he oversteps his bounds, it's likely to bite him hard in his 2020 reelection bid.
No one is saying that campaigns and voting behavior wouldn't change. Just that the electoral college is a ridiculous system in the first place and should be gotten rid of.
I feel like I'm in the minority these days, but I personally think the Electoral College is a clever system that should remain. As large, coastal cities like NYC & LA continue to grow, they risk becoming entirely self-serving at the expense of the rest of the US. Voters in fly-over states often deal with agricultural and manufacturing issues that aren't even on the radar for voters in urban centers, so it's important to ensure the voice of middle-America isn't totally drowned out.
Some argue that was the original intent of the Founding Fathers by including the 10th amendment.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,
nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
or to the people.
To what extent the Federal government has or has not encroached upon States' rights has become a partisan issue in its own right, these days.
The larger the effect of disenfranchisement via the electoral college is (and therefore, the less effective democratic participation is I resolving the concerns of the people it underrepresents), the greater the likelihood that it causes a crisis which gets resolved by means other than peaceful democratic participation.
The real issue it (along with the 3/5 compromise, the structure of the Senate, and the limited term explicit protection of the slave trade in the original Constitution) addressed is that, in the early US, slavery wasn't all that popular in the states that were more urbanized and had economies and value systems that supported growth in the enfranchised population, so the system had to be skewed to protect the masters in the disenfranchising states for theme to feel secure in their "peculiar institution", even if that meant sacrificing the ideal of equality even among the enfranchised citizenry.
The electoral college had literally nothing to do with slavery, and everything to do with balancing population-based governance and state-based governance (i.e. the reason we have both a House and Senate).
The 3/5 compromise was used to calculate the population-based component of governance, and at any rate, is no longer used so completely irrelevant today.
The electoral college was created as a part of the three fifths compromise. In order to get southern states on board, the framers needed to find a clever way to count slaves as population without letting them vote. Three-fifths plus the electoral college let them do that. It's an ugly hack that should be patched.
And don't give me any of that "republic" crap. As if anyone has any idea who their electors are, or cares. No voter honestly thinks they are selecting an elector qualified to relay popular opinion to the government. They're voting for the president.
The EC was imagined in an era where people thought the government would be more a federation of states than a central government. That is not what we have today. The system does not make sense in the current context.
Maybe you'll play the "regional interests" card. Sure. Is it any more fair that a minority candidate can be elected by the less populous states, rather than having a majority candidate elected by the more populous states? No. It's a facile argument that falls apart with any examination.
Given the poor modern justification for the EC, and all of the negative externalities it causes (election of less popular candidates, voter suppression and apathy in partisan states, etc.), it deserves to be abolished.
The problem with abandoning the electoral college is that it would violate the original principle[0], namely that the President should be elected by both a population-based and state-based mechanism. So unless we want to repudiate that founding principle, the electoral college is still the way to achieve that balance (then and now).
The electoral college is not racist, either. The 3/5 compromise of course came into any situation where population was considered (including the electoral college), as the country still had slavery at the time. We no longer have that compromise: blacks, women, men without land, etc. can all vote in 2016.
Abandoning the electoral college would just weaken the States, and if that's the plan, we might as well abolish the Senate too—it exists because of the exact same principle.
> In Federalist No. 39, Madison argued the Constitution was designed to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. Congress would have two houses: the state-based Senate and the population-based House of Representatives. Meanwhile, the president would be elected by a mixture of the two modes.
a) There is a structural imbalance in how the electorate is represented, especially considering congressional district gerrymandering (not directly related to the race for President, I know, and ...
b) People are in shock that a racist and a demagogue has been elected as President and searching for confirmation that a majority of our fellow citizens do not in fact believe in the reprehensible and Un-American values which Donald Trump and his rise to power represent.
I would also add c) Many people feel that the popular vote is what should be important. For example, polls in the media almost always report the popular vote tallies and nothing deeper, with the assumption that the Electoral College result will follow. Historically, this has been true the vast majority of the time. The Electoral College has only gone against the popular vote five times, and before Bush 43, the last time it happened was all the way back in 1888.
The more the Electoral College diverges from the popular vote, the better case you can make for changing the system. And on the other side, if somehow the counts were wrong and the popular vote did favor Trump, that would greatly undermine the argument for reform.
Also, going with the electoral college suppresses overall voter turnout in states that are "locks" like California, New York, Oklahoma, etc.
If I live in California, I'm less incentivized to show up for the election because I think of it as a lock. Obviously I should still show up to vote elsewhere on the ballot, but I may not because I won't influence the election.
If we were measuring by popular vote, turnout would be a lot higher and the outcome would, likely, be a better representation of the country.
Turnout would certainly be higher, but it's not clear that it would be a "better" representation of the country.
The electoral college distribute power, to some degree, based on geography. Geography is correlated with a large number of other "diversities" of American culture, from race, population density, to industry, to global warming risk, etc... Switching it to a straight majority would take power away from all of these subsets of society.
This election, it seems, it was "white rust belt" Americans that decided the election. In Gore vs Bush, it was Florida. Next time, it will be something else. It's all highly imperfect and somewhat random, but I see danger in solidifying power in what essentially will be people who live in cities.
As it stands, power is solidified in a dozen or so swing states, which make up about 20% of the country's population and aren't particularly representative. The electoral college isn't distributing power, it's concentrating power in a few fairly arbitrary places.
No, it was any state that Bush won. For example, had Gore won his own home state of TN, FL wouldn't have mattered. But any state shifting to Gore would have been enough.
> when in fact, more people wanted the other person
The whole point of the comment you replied to was that you don't know that - can't know that. People voted under the current system, we don't know what their voting behavior would have been if the voting system would have been based on popular votes! For example, those in states where the winner was always clear from the start might have gone voting instead of staying at home, or they might not have voted for a 3rd party. It's not like the popular vote is 70%/30%, the total difference is far less than a single percentage point.
And Trump does have a mandate. The system is at it is - it has been like that since the very beginning of this country. I may not agree personally, but he won, and I really don't see any positive point in attempts that try to reinterpret the result. Remember, some day the roles may be switched.
It's a factual statement that more people voted for Clinton period. Whether that would have been different without the electoral college is conjecture.
Yes. It also is a factual statement to say that all those votes were made by people voting in the current system and with the current system in mind. All my points still stand.
Not that this changes your argument in general, but the current difference is half (edit: not one, oops!) of a percentage point, and will likely be larger by the time all the counting is done.
> The whole point of the comment you replied to was that you don't know that - can't know that. People voted under the current system, we don't know what their voting behavior would have been if the voting system would have been based on popular votes!
Obviously it's too late for any change to the electoral college to affect this election. But we could know this in the future. You make what you measure and we're measuring the wrong thing.
> I feel like people's behavior would change if the metric to elect the president was solely based on the popular vote.
Agreed. For most of us who wish to change or abolish the electoral college, the fact that people feel (mostly accurately) that their vote doesn't matter, and therefore don't participate in the electoral process, is the primary problem we would like to address.
I think it's somewhat ironic that usually the people complaining about their vote not mattering come from states like CA or NY that are guaranteed to go to one party, and they complain that the only votes that matter are in swing states.
To me, it seems that the people that should be pissed are the ones in swing states, since the winner-take-all nature of the EC means half of those states are completely un-represented.
Agreed, it doesn't matter whether you're in the majority or the minority, everything above the 50% line is ignored. In fact, if there's a third party in play, more than half of the votes are ignored.
Short answer: yes. We are a democratic republic but most people think of us as a direct democracy. At some point, we may decide to change how we vote for president. Thus, it is worth knowing what the majority actually voted for. No, it can't change the past, but yes, it can change the future.
> Short answer: yes. We are a democratic republic but most people think of us as a direct democracy.
Can someone point me out as why Americans differentiate republic from direct democracy? I reckon than in most of the world these words don't mean opposites. Republic means just "not a monarchy/aristocracy" where I live, and I reckon in most of the world.
(This is a genuine question, maybe there is a reason for the American usage of the term)
Generally it's called a republic if there is representative government, i.e. if you have a senate or a congress. Presumably by direct democracy people mean voting directly on issues, in which case I'm not sure there's any state of a significant size implementing that particular form of government.
> Generally it's called a republic if there is representative government
No, if there's an elected representative government, it's generally a representative democracy. Even when (as in the case of the UK) it's also a Constitutional monarchy, and so not a republic of any kind.
> We are a democratic republic but most people think of us as a direct democracy.
A direct democracy is one where voters vote directly on issues rather than representatives who make decisions on issues; basically no one thinks the US is like this, though many individual states in the US incorporate some degree of direct democracy via initiative and referendum.
I think it would be more accurate than your formulation to say "We are a federal republic with a very loose approximation of representative democracy, but most people think we are, or at least should be, a representative democracy (which would still be a federal republic, but also a democratic republic.)"
People need to understand that the electoral college is working as designed.
The US was created to be something like the EU: a confederation of states.
Everyone intuitively understands that Luxembourg and Malta need to have protections in the EU so that Germany and France don't always get their way. The only way to achieve this is to have some disproportionate representation for the smaller member states.
In the US we have become much more centralized since WWII and FDR and now we seem more like a regular country with a unified power structure. But the system we're built upon is still designed for a group of largely autonomous states.
> People need to understand that the electoral college is working as designed.
Well, as much as is possible given the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 24th Amendments. But they also need to understand that the Electoral College was designed to reward disenfranchisement (which it still does) and protect slavery (which, at least in formal terms, it no longer does.)
> People need to understand that the electoral college is working as designed.
The electoral college was indeed intended to ensure representation for all of the states, but it is definitely not working the way it was originally designed.
The original design assumed that the voters would vote for electors by name (i.e. the electors' names would be on the ballot, not the candidates' names), and the chosen electors would exercise independent judgment and vote for the candidate they thought would be the best president. We know this is the original intention, because the people who designed the electoral college wrote about this at length.
When some states started putting the names of the presidential candidates on the ballots instead of the names of the electors, James Madison and the other people who designed the electoral college were very unhappy about it. They felt so strongly about it that they proposed amending the constitution to require that ballots contain the electors' names rather than the candidates' names.
When electors are bound to vote for a certain candidate, it's clear that the electoral college is not working as it was originally designed.
I dunno if it's actually working as designed, if only because it doesn't seem like it will step in and prevent Trump from being US president, which I believe is the stated purpose of the electoral college, based on contemporary writings.
If the elecrotates choose Trump, the electoral college will have failed its final test.
I really think they need to look at what the difference between "news" and the web is. I thought news was a list of sites that I could exclude if I felt they weren't worth reading.
They also have a bug with the interpretation links to snopes.com that has been reported to them[1]. I wonder if that affects any other site? I would doubt it would be just one.
I am already missing the days when all information disseminated to the masses was hand-curated by passionate, serious, intelligent professionals who staked their careers -- their lives -- on accuracy and objectivity. Those are days that went out with the internet.
How do you define 'fake' news sites now after all the mainstream media outlets called the election so completely wrong? It all seems like propaganda with people trying to push their views.
It's a bias that you can trust but verify. For instance, AV software, and web filtering apps rate websites you visit with a score and could block you from visiting sites with a low score to keep you "safe". If web filtering vendor A is a competitor of vendor B or doesn't like the world view of candidate X, they could easily block you from going there. So we have to trust but verify. This is why open source is helpful so we can see the algorithm or reasons why something is blocked.
I see the problem you are describing.... But if google or Facebook blocks something, its totally possible that you won't even be able to verify... Things will vanish forever.
Shouldn't blantantly false information vanish forever, or at least be pushed out of the platform? For example, the meme on Facebook that said the Pope endorsed Donald Trump. It was blatantly false; and yet it was shared over a million times.
I guess while we're on the topic, and since it appears in the WaPo's screenshot, can someone give insight on how the hell Heavy.com is almost always at the top ofbreaking news links when doing standard Google News searches for people suddenly in the news? Things like: "John Doe: 5 Facts You Need to Know"
Entirely cribbed from real news sites' coverage when it's not just innuendo. And yet when the news is fresh, Heavy.com is almost always at the top, beating out original coverage and even sites that do it much better (DailyMail comes to mind).
I get that prioritized placement of proper nouns in the headline and page title can boost SERP, but this is ridiculously effective SEO-gaming, the likes which were mostly stopped when Google's Panda was thought to drastically hurt content farms like Demand Media [0]
Even the article the WaPo screenshot, which is the very first link for "clinton vs trump", is just fluff:
> There are millions of ballots that haven’t been counted yet from the 2016 presidential election. How many? The New York Times estimated on November 12 that there are 7 million uncounted ballots in the country.
How is this beating actual URLs to live poling data that have Clinton vs Trump in the title?
This reminds me a lot of Ryan Holiday's book, Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator.
Except that is it something that happens via automation rather than through methods listed in the book. Still the book is a good read if just to get acquainted with how one can manipulate media in this day and age.
Every corporation try to hide now they hate against Trump. Sad that there is so many liars in corporate world. I Don't trust anything that Google, Facebook & Twitter is pushing. Trust issue is really understatement.
It is a crazy time that we live in. We have a massive group of people that openly reject mainstream news and were lead there by the now President elect. Trump spent his entire campaign crafting an alternative reality and now millions of people are all in. If he continues down this road of trashing mainstream media institutions while pointing people to his cronny owned newsertainment entities like Breitbart I am very concerned about the future.
The Trump bubble has to burst eventually and I think the American's that voted for him are in for a rude awakening when it does. I just hope the fallout doesn't bring down too much of the country.
276 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadFor those downvoting, read at least this:
http://nypost.com/2016/10/12/how-the-washington-post-killed-...
What is the baseline?
Also, these were clearly-identified opinion pieces. Fake news doesn't identify itself as such.
Nonsensical beliefs and faulty reasoning are deprecated (and ideally not represented at all) in any well informed clear thinking venue. Here that manifests, quite sensibly, by the downvote.
And any meritocracy would eventually eliminate nonsensical views entirely.
So the problem comes when a political movement harnesses nonsense while clear thinking people have systematical eliminated it entirely from their discourse. And after that movement's unexpected triumph, the clear thinkers try to understand what happened.
A hard problem I would say.
In other words, serious reporting (as opposed to opinion pieces) treated lies as though they were truths. This could only be considered harmful.
There has been quite a lot of discussion around this. See, for example:
The Death of 'He Said, She Said' Journalism http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/the-deat...
Big lie, little lie, and the media’s role in telling the difference http://www.cjr.org/criticism/trump_birtherism_lie_media.php
It’s Not Too Late for the Media to Fix Its Election Coverage: A final plea for sanity in how we report on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. https://newrepublic.com/article/136848/its-not-late-media-fi...
There's also the issue of false balance (Edit: which is the point of your links, actually, so I'm just stating explicitly). I think the media, in an attempt to appear more unbiased, has been more giving air to statements which are misleading or arguably not true. Politicians have noticed this and taken advantage of it. (This is independent of actual bias in the media.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/our-first-ame...
[1]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/79783222980005068...
Yup. A lot of media organizations endorsed Clinton over Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...
I've been (admittedly amateurishly) looking for research on media bias. Research is limited by its methods, and researchers hold opinions, results can be subject to confirmation bias, so this whole area is difficult for the every day person to sift through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias_in_the_United_State...
I find it hard to believe that no bias exists, and I think a lot of journalists try to be objective, with varying success. The question to me is how much bias there is, how we can keep that in mind, and how we can agree on some shared understanding of facts.
It's also in the interest of these organizations to support the First Amendment. Hard to ask them to be against — or even neutral — the First Amendment, just as we'd expect for any business to support aspects of the Constitution or law that are in their own self interest (regardless of whether we agree with it).
It's also in the interest of Americans in general for strong First Amendment rights. It has broad support across parties. This kind of nuance doesn't fit easily in 140 characters or support the easy "us vs them" characterization.
Pretty hard to endorse Trump, given that he's a crooked racist and narcissist, a sexual predator, a pathological liar, and wholly unqualified for any public office. Given what he said in his speeches, not many companies would even hire him.
As a result, even Republican newspapers broke with tradition and endorsed HRC, except for one Las Vegas paper owned by one of Trump's backers.
> I find it hard to believe that no bias exists, and I think a lot of journalists try to be objective, with varying success.
There's a strong bias towards getting the truth reported, which is why the leading newspapers have trained journalists, fact checkers, subeditors etc, plus ombudsmen to handle complaints.
If you have the facts then you can argue about causes and solutions, and you might have (say) a more Democratic or a more Republican approach to those. Those opinions may involve denying at least some of the facts, but people generally choose the outlets that suit their own opinions.
The problems start when news outlets no longer care about facts, like Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge etc. Fox actually argued in court that it wasn't obliged to tell the truth because it was an entertainment channel.
The only thing I'll turn to these corrupt giants now is weather events. Can't slant those in any way. We need to break up the 6 corporations that control our media, ASAP.
Sadly, it's even worse than it sounds, because now even the alt-right websites can't tell the truth. For an interesting short piece about this, see the final section of "Donald Trump broke the conservative media" (1). Quote:
One of the chief problems, Sykes (2) said, was that it had become impossible to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past several decades, the conservative news media had "basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers."
"There's nobody," he lamented. "Let's say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it's a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, 'By the way, you know it's false.' And they'll say, 'Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.' Or they'll say, 'I saw it on a Facebook page.' And I'll say, 'The New York Times did a fact check.' And they'll say, 'Oh, that's The New York Times. That's bulls---.' There's nobody — you can't go to anybody and say, 'Look, here are the facts.'"
"And I have to say that's one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there's no way to break through it," Sykes continued. "And I swim upstream because if I don't say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they'll ask what's wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true."
(1) http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-drudg...
Edit/insert:
(2) "Charlie Sykes, a popular conservative talk show host in Wisconsin"
Yeah, no. I see the dung heap in front of me, I don't need conservative click bait news outlets to help me.
Though ironically it's now been bumped to second by the WaPo article about it.
(For example, critical thinking has helped me to date — I believe — because it's not worth going after me as you only need 50% of the population to win an election. Just as it isn't worth trying to write a Nigerian scam email that's good enough to get me because there is plenty of lower-hanging fruit.)
Speaking up and attempting to educate people if they are buying the propaganda is another "weapon".
Of course it isn't always effective but if enough people challenge someone hopefully they may reconsider.
Accurate analysis of content is still a part of literacy. How you do that without discernment, I have no idea.
I think people understanding arguments would be a nice step forward.
EDIT: (I am a perfect example) :D
Critical thinking is not a shield against your own bias.
You are correct, it is not, but at least it acknowledges that biases are there. Most people don't even know what personal biases are to begin with.
Re-read the comment you responded to. I agreed with you. What is it that you think I am claiming? My only claim (admittedly that I am aware of) is that fake news would have a harder time having impact in a climate where people practiced more critical thinking than they do currently.
fake news helps in reinforcing views already held, which matters.
(Not speaking for GP... Just a reminder that that is the context of what we are talking about)
But even if you want to go down that road that I am pretty sure that there would be plenty of self correction happening unless you decided to stay isolated from the rest of the world right after you read that. Thats obviously not whats happening at all.
You have any sources what so ever that proves that misinformation actually made Trump president?
"Global Warming is a Chinese Hoax"
"Ted Cruiz's father killed JFK"
"Obama and Hillary founded ISIS"
Is it even possible to separate that man from misinformation?
Edit: I have anecdotal "evidence" that some of his voters where swayed by this stuff from conversations I have had with Trump supporters. While that isn't enough to make the claim that misinformation is the sole cause of his election (a claim btw, that I have not seen made on this thread.. you are the one that brought it up), it does show me that its impact was greater than 0.
You forget that people gravitate towards what they believe in already. They aren't sitting there evaluation who to believe in based on the facts out there.
I agree, but it doesn't discount it either, it simply means greater than 0. Its not enough to draw a conclusion from which is why I haven't. My only claim is that critical thinking would lessen the non-zero impact.
EDIT: I had assumed this is what we were talking about, excuse my own biases, lol :D
Also, Clinton won women 54% to 42%.
I did a Google search (ironic, I know) for "Trump traitor gender" and I couldn't find columnists referring to Trump-voting women as traitors to their gender. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but I think this illustrates the sort of problem we are faced with
http://www.chicksontheright.com/feminists-say-white-women-ar...
Perhaps that blogpost partially satisfies GP's assertion, but this little thread illustrates how difficult it is to fact-check political rhetoric, even in the absence of fake news.
Anyone who followed the election just a little bit saw plenty of that.
Here is another one that didn't take me more than one search either.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/election/republican-women-su...
If anything it proves exactly what I said.
In the interest of going forward instead of just arguing back and forth about sources, I looked for a few. Disclaimer: I am generally anti-feminist in my views. For reproducibility's sake, I used combinations of the following search terms: feminism, white women, trump, internalized misogyny, we need to talk, intersectionality. I also added tl;drs to each link but don't consider them canonical.
I didn't find enough posts outright calling women "gender traitors". I don't believe that is the most common feminist MO - they are more likely to blame "internalized misogyny" and "white women abandoning the sisterhood"(I guess that's close enough?), which are both long-standing narratives among feminism(feminists vs non-feminists, and the internal racial divide).
The rage I found was mostly on Twitter, feeding into my preconceived notion that Twitter is cancerous to actual discussion. Here's a quick twitter dump to illustrate:
> https://twitter.com/BDubBabyGirl/status/797128287206146048
> https://twitter.com/Karnythia/status/796350601449926656
> https://twitter.com/AnasuyaIam/status/796462867868512256
> https://twitter.com/NotYourBlkFrnd/status/796937029414096896
> https://twitter.com/TorraineWalker/status/796363979711021056
> https://twitter.com/MJStarLover/status/796246525647187969?re...
> https://twitter.com/NicCageMatch/status/796443880333811713?r...
> https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/796421710669115392?ref_...
> http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nus-womens-officer-har...
-------------------------------------------------------
Past the twitter outrage, the articles I found were a lot more analytical and introspective. Like I said, the most common themes were "white women betraying the sisterhood", and women in general "suffering" from "internalized misogyny":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLWv-hivjt4 - Women voting for trump are "fucking dumb"
http://forward.com/sisterhood/353945/so-um-about-the-white-f... - White women don't believe in feminism, they have "internalized sexism", they take comfort in playin...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841565
Someone is flagged & dead in this thread for daring to suggest that Meliana Trump might end up as first lady. Another (also flagged/dead) response called them a "poll truther" for that comment.
A lot of people want to blame "bad polling" for this, but they were biased towards Obama turnout numbers, which didn't happen, and ignored the fact that Trump was filling rallies and Hillary wasn't. Or how being viewed as a Trump supporter can be completely unsafe: See also:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/11/14/man...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNegGEoohK4
http://heavy.com/news/2016/11/trump-portland-oregon-protest-...
I know at least one family member was disowned by a friend of 11 years over this election.
But neither was the post saying "I have visions of Bill, passed out in a hammock on the White House lawn, surrounded by empties and cheeto packets." voted down, so that would tend to weigh against it being purely a matter of being a comment with no substance.
I'd say that it appears that people believed it was the type of political falsehood we're talking about here. I mean, it did say 'more than likely' so anyone who believed the 98-99% estimates should have considered it laughably false based on the evidence they knew. The other comment made a more specific, factual claim that couldn't be laughed off, though I saw many stories aghast that 538 would break ranks.
I can't find a source, but in part the consistency of the polls reminds me of the stories of how the measurements of some physical constant (g?) drifted over time because everyone felt beholden to the 'consensus' value, which was wrong. I wish I could find that, I think I saw it on HN a long time ago.
Obviously, it's 'safest' to use the same assumptions everyone else did. When 538 broke from the herd, a lot of people questioned them on it. Based on the results, they were at least 30+% more correct than the 99%ers. And I think all of them were operating on assumptions that have been invalidated.
I hope more institutions can look at viewpoint diversity more closely [2].
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-social-science... [2] http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/10/welcome-to-heterodoxa...
But if you are implying that having a strongly-held political opinion is "bias", then I disagree. The idea that academics, or anyone else should be perfectly neutral (if that's your implication) doesn't really make sense.
Care to back that idea up?
Critical thinking isn't some magic sauce that once you learn it it allow you to approach everything with that.
You still need experience and to build up an intuition about where and how to apply it in a given situation.
Critical thinking is about as generalized as you can get. The definition google spits out is:
"the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment."
Im curious... when would you not try to apply critical thinking when making a decision?
A voter who doesn't have a job because of ex. globalization isn't going to apply the same critical thinking of a voter who is doing well and is benefitting from globalization.
We are all trapped by our frames of reference, no amount of critical thinking is going to change that and just because you know of critical thinking you aren't going to make better decisions.
Furthermore there are plenty of people who understand and apply critical thinking. What is really missing is constructive thinking but thats another thing all together.
In my opinion, we aren't there yet since there are huge disparities between education quality across the public school system. One solution (IMO) is to standardize funding; today school districts rely on local funding which can result in tremendous funding disparities (and by extension, disparities in education quality).
Pretending that propaganda and information warfare only affect dumb people is dangerous thinking.
The implicit solution you're suggesting would curtail the First amendment. That's a bigger threat to democracy than a misinformed populace IMHO. What we really need are annotations that are community driven. A "bs meter" if you will.
Edit: Corrected populous -> populace
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Legislati...
A law that prevents google algorithm to (not)take truthiness into account would probably be constitutional.
Updated accordingly, thanks for the correction.
Let's say identical articles get published in Huffington Post and Breitbart (since most journalism is reposting AP/Reuters/Youtube/Imgur/Twitter with a h/t at the end anyway, its not unbelievable.)
The HP article gets shared by the left-bubble and spreads rapidly. Now if The left-internet catches wind of a controversial Breitbart article, they attack. In left-internet the Breitbart article will perish, the HP, flourish.
Because there are 55 hundred million versions of the same article posted across thousands of sources, there are always variants of each story that exhibit each behavior in each community.
If Facebook/Google instituted a policy of denying ad payouts to fake news (assuming that could be reliably determined) then the problem would correct itself. Of course, content creators would argue that it's "entertainment" and that "no one really believes it" but that's another issue. :)
Story time...
The very first class I took in college was called Information Fluency, back in 2002. Among other things, it taught HTML and CSS (which I already knew) and then the professor did something really interesting for the capstone project, which was to have everyone create a fake website containing some big news and host it on its own domain (which weren't so easy to get back then). The more real-looking you made it, the higher your score. So you quickly learned to pay attention to little things such as copyright notices in footers, professional-looking logos, professional-sounding domain names, static pages for stuff like "organization history" and whatnot.
The best part though? As extra credit, the teacher sent everyone a list of ten links, which were either the fake websites created by other students, or real websites. If you were able to correctly distinguish the fake ones from the real ones, you earned the extra credit! So your overall score was a function of how well you fooled others, and how likely you yourself were to be fooled. :)
I got the highest score in that class. Mine was a website belonging to some fake space agency called Interstellar Space Sciences, and it was reporting on its front page that scientists had found trace of alien life on Mars. The story had fake citations from real people working at real organizations, as well as high-quality photos of what looked like the Martian landscape (actually Death Valley in California that I applied a reddish color filter to) and diagrams of organic molecules. I also had a "Contact Us" page where I listed my phone number, which several people actually called! For a period of three weeks I just answered all calls with, "Good afternoon, Interstellar Space Sciences, how may I direct your call?" and everyone fell for it, including some of my actual friends...
Anyway, I think my experiences in that class turned me into a super skeptic, and from then on I started to take all incoming information with a grain of salt, especially if it is reported in the news.
Only in some cases: consider how much money is spent on political advertising, and then all of the second-order work funding think-tanks, newspapers, magazines, TV networks, etc. to promote a particular viewpoint. I wouldn't classify Reason as a fake news source but they're an example of what that might look like. Here are their IRS filings from 2015 showing ~90% of their operating income coming from donations:
https://www.reason.org/files/2015-reason_990.pdf
What happens if one or two of their major donors decides this isn't the most effective way to support their viewpoint and they'd get more return at the polls by setting up a less ethical site?
How many Google Ads could you buy for $9M/year, and how quickly would that translate into organic page-rank? Now consider that Presidential campaign spending has been in the billion-plus range for awhile and ask how many activist donors would be totally comfortable dropping tens of millions for a couple of years to run a fake site if they thought it'd be more effective than a few more TV ads.
The concept has been weaponized already:
Russia and the Menace of Unreality: How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/rus...]
The Challenge of Russia’s Anti-Western Information Warfare[http://www.diplomaatia.ee/en/article/the-challenge-of-russia...]
Same goes for weapons of mass destruction. Media just supported bogus claims of Bush administration to sway public support to invade Iraq.
Latest of all is ISIS - It's very hard to believe that American Military who monitors almost entire world failed to monitor a high risk area for such a long time that 30,000 strong army was able to train and arm itself to such an extent that they were able to defeat trained armies.
But the atlantic article itself reads like a propoganda.
There are ethnic russians who speak russian living as the majority group in a region called novorussia less than 150 years ago. None of that is false. Why not conduct a plebiscite there? These people will shit on India for kashmir or Israel for Palestine, but will turn a blind eye towards other areas. Propoganda it is too.
Take Novorossiya, the name Vladimir Putin has given to the huge wedge of southeastern Ukraine he might, or might not, consider annexing. The term is plucked from tsarist history, when it represented a different geographical space.
Then they link a yandex search for, what the context suggests, should be contemporary Novorossiya maps produced by Russian propaganda. But they seem to match this map, uploaded to Wikipedia five years before the Crimean invasion:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RussianEmpireMap1800...
And it does look like southeastern Ukraine indeed. So?
I can speak about Kashmir and why plebiscite will not be a fair thing to do. Kashmiris now consists of Muslim majority as a result of systematic culling. This was not the case in 1970. With external support, an Ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus was carried out for decade and Media kept silent. In fact Indian Government itself was the culprit. In its policy of minority appeasement, they completely ignored mass culling of Hindu population.
A bigger issue is the radicalization of the 95%.
This is also not limited to the US, crappy fake and editorialized news that are as fact checked as a teenager's first date story is everywhere.
The example that really opened my eyes was the reporting in the NYT running up to the Iraq war, during which they falsely reported Saddam Hussain had large stockpiles of WMDs.
I'm not saying that mainstream media outlets report incorrectly at times - they do - but they are dragged over the coals for it, repeatedly. This new generation of Facebook-only news pages are so numerous that they are never called out loudly and clearly.
The most recent would be everyone getting the polls wrong by assuming Obama turnouts and ignoring the enthusiasm gap at the rallies. To his credit, Nate Silver realized we were just 'one normal polling error away from electing Trump' only to get attacked for not showing 98-99% odds of Clinton as you can read here:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/nate-silver-huffington...
There's a reasonable range of disagreement. But a model showing Clinton at 98% or 99% is not defensible based on the empirical evidence. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
The posts seem on the Facebook pages many people forward are knowingly incorrect. And they're not getting called out. It's a whole new ball game.
Anything you do to suppress information will trigger the Streisand Effect. Any censorship of it will be routed around because this is the internet.
The cure for bad speech has always been more speech.
A more recent media failure would be the Rolling Stone campus-rape article.
You're right – and it's a good point – that there are a lot of trash "news" sites being passed around on facebook that are obviously completely bogus, and no one ever bothers to debunk them.
But I don't see it as much more of threat to democracy than the sometimes-right, sometimes-pushing-an-agenda mainstream media we've had since forever.
When people rail against facebook (essentially a communication tool) "allowing" these fake news articles to proliferate, what they're essentially saying is people should only be allowed to share with their friends official "truth", as decided by some arbitrary third party.
That, to me, seems much scarier and like more of a threat to democracy.
So depending on how you define informed citizenry I don't think you are right. And I believe that way too much importance is being put on the fake news effect. It has nothing to do with why people voted like they did. If anything EVERYONE is living in a filter bubble and have been doing that since the dawn of man.
The voters who voted for Trump or Hillary were informed enough to make a choice because they voted on what they experience in their everyday. Thats the whole idea.
The idea isn't that someone dictates what it means to be informed (i know you didn't say specifically but you seem to imply something along those line)
News fake or not isn't what drive most peoples decisions and I would ask you to ask yourself if you changed your opinion on something that was you found out was fake. My guess is you didn't even when you thought it was right.
The whole idea with a democracy is that no one get to decide what is important to voters and so no one get to decide what they need to be informed about.
Politics about prioritization it's NOT an academic discipline. People who voted for Trump did so because of what they felt was important just like voters for Hillary did on her.
Who are you or I to say what information is the right information to judge based on?
For example, the climate change debate should be about how much effort to put into fighting it, whether regulatory or market-based solutions are more appropriate, etc. Instead, the debate is about whether it's even happening at all.
If we can't even agree on basic facts, what hope is there of choosing effective leadership?
You prove my very point. Your believe that the priority should be about how we should fight it. Thats your prioritization. You don't even have to be a climate sceptic to come up with another perspective which is. You don't need to worry about that, technology will solve it.
Agreeing on the basic facts has absolutely nothing to do with politics. Because even the basic facts aren't what drives politics decision making.
The problem isn't that people are arguing that "zero" is the correct answer to the question. The problem is that we lack a shared basis of facts, to the extent that about half of the electorate will say that the question itself is based on false assumptions.
There is not right prioritization here. Only the one people make. Thats democracy.
But there are right facts. And if the basis of someone's prioritization is "climate change isn't even happening, so of course we shouldn't do anything to fight it" then I think it's reasonable to call that position uninformed.
The problem isn't that some people think it's unimportant. The problem is that many people think it's not even real.
I.e. you can be as educated liberal as you want that does not mean that the facts you care about are more important than the facts som uneducated trump supporter cares about.
For a more political fact, Barack Obama either was or was not born in the US. People made political decisions based on whether or not this is true. For the argument I'm making, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. It's that a fact is politically important.
If you're arguing that which facts are true is ultimately relative, I'm not going to chase you down that particular rabbit hole.
Perhaps what I'm saying is obvious and trivial to you, and we're speaking past each other.
What I disagree with is whether they impact the voters as has been claimed (not necessarily by you) and which I believe is the base of this whole thread here.
The critical thinking only help you based on your premise it doesn't give you the "right" premise IMO.
As for impact on voters: Do you think there were any voters that cast their vote in part on their belief whether or not Obama was born in the US?
Keep in mind many of the people who voted in Trump also voted in Obama.
1) There are facts.
2) Facts have an impact on voters.
The open question then is
3) The weight voters give these facts varies from voter to voter and fact to fact.
Is that fair? I can certainly agree to that. What do you think?
I agree that facts impact voters, but thats not really important. Whats important is which facts impact them.
I.e. the facts that a Trump voter cares about vs. the ones that a Hillary voter cares about.
I don't believe people voted based non-facts. They voted on the facts they know to be true and important to them.
I.e. I don't subscribe to some idea of a false consciousness.
My reaction is solely on the idea that people can't believe facts that aren't true, that they can't be misinformed, and that the news plays no role in misinforming them.
This goes back to
"Everyone in a democracy is informed, there is no such thing as uninformed voters per se...
News fake or not isn't what drive most peoples decisions "
The news is a source of information/facts for people. Some of those facts may be false, and people may believe facts that aren't true. People who believe facts that aren't true are uninformed/misinformed.
Perhaps a source of misunderstanding is I'm making little distinction between uninformed and misinformed, equating for these purposes misinformed and uninformed of the truth regarding a fact they accept. I do agree that people are subject to confirmation bias, fitting facts to what they believe more often than not. Jonathan Haidt's elephant/rider metaphor seems apt as well. This seems in line with your statements on how facts influence views.
I had to look up false consciousness. While I do think there are misinformation and disinformation campaigns (which is what some campaigning seems to be reduced to, nowadays), I don't subscribe to some purposeful, widespread, institutional, systemic propaganda machine. Some may argue that I'm likely just naïve.
By the way, I'm trying to reach some shared understanding. I'm not arguing for the sake of argument or just trying to argue against whatever you happen to say. I hope that's clear :) I don't think we're actually all that far off in opinion, if at all. Perhaps we're just prioritizing different parts of the equation.
Thanks for sticking with this by the way, and remaining civil. I'm sure you've noticed as well how off the rails a lot of these discussions can go.
Anyway yeah I think we are agreeing more than disagreeing.
My original point is just an objection to this idea that if only people were better educated we wouldn't have people voting for Trump. Thats not whats actually said but it's in there between the lines.
The reality is that we all have our different perspectives and are all right about things and wrong about other things.
That you are well educated and have learned critical thinking does not make you a critical thinker and that you are not less likely to be misinformed just because you are better educated and have learned about critical thinking.
In some ways although it might be a stretch I would argue that being aware of critical thinking makes you more likely to venture outside areas that you know about because you believe that your critical thinking is going to save you.
If this election underlined something once again for me it is that being educated and understanding what critical thinking is doesn't make you immune for that misinformation.
Evidence that this meets any reasonable definition of many voters? Even in the states that flipped, the numbers aren't such that mathematically many (or even any) voters need to have switched that direction. There's probably some, but I haven't seen any indictation in any source that suggests substantial numbers.
So, yeah, I'm sure there are some Obama/Trump voters, but I haven't seen a coherent case that there are a lot, just generous application of the fallacy of division.
Besides, mere facts are not enough; any decent writer can spin the same facts as positive or negative.
That is absolutely an editorial bias on the part of a search engine and Blekko was pretty up front about it. Similarly health queries would land on actual medical doctor written web sites rather than "fake" medical information sites.
But this is the thing, we would get complaints that we were "suppressing the truth" because conspiracy theorists and alternate medicine devotees would argue we did not provide results in line with their notion of the truth.
You can't really argue against that point of view, while you can disagree with it, a person's "ground truth" is often unique to them and their social circle. Thus if you want to serve your customer you need to support their desire to see the world through their own lens. But if you don't know who your customer is you can't really predict what their lens should be (that old "don't collect data on me!" principle which Blekko also followed). It makes for an interesting place to be.
That said, since Bing manages to weed out the fake news sites apparently so in that regard they have a higher search quality score than Google on this query. And websites that use their index benefit from that as well.
Should Google, Facebook and Twitter turn into clickbait-vetting institutions? No, we should educate citizens instead to make better decisions and I don't mean voting for Hillary makes you an educated voter just because someone said so.
[1] This discussion is borderline ridiculous. Would we have this discussion if Ms Clinton had won the election? I doubt it. The DNC should do some introspection, stop asking how did we lose this election and start asking why did we lose this election, accept in democracies upsets happen and stop this insane witch hunt and get their shit together because we entire world is going to need them.
I was told several times that Snopes is a liberal/democrat operative and has been proven to be wrong in the past. When requested, I was never provided with cases where Snopes was has been wrong. I was also told that PolitiFact.com was started and run by the Clinton campaign.
These "news" articles got even worse with the Podesta emails. It's easy for the blatantly false alt-right sites like InfoWars to make up stories and then these click-farming sites run those stories with even more sensational headlines. This was the case I saw with the "Spirit cooking" and claims that the Clinton camp was really a pedophile ring (using an email chain referencing kids in a swimming pool as "entertainment" as proof. In context, the emailer was someone speaking of bringing their own 3 kids to the party)
I don't know if these people were tricked, or if they were willfully ignorant because these "news" stories mad them feel justified in their preexisting hatred of all things democrat, liberal, and Clinton.
People who should know better STILL believe that the reason Clinton lost is that she really is "corrupt." "She is corrupt because of the email leak." The emails I read seemed extremely banal ("Should we be bad and get a latte?"), even inspiring in some cases (Chelsea communicating about the Haiti earthquake response). I never saw anything concrete that made sense to me come out of that, and I spent a good amount of time looking into it, including reading through the text of emails which had been cherry-picked as being supposedly "damning." Getting together with "elite" people is not in and of itself proof of corruption: how could she do her work as First Lady, Secretary of State, and Senator, without that?
Ranting about "corruption" is one of the tricks of demagogues. Just read this Wikipedia article and tell me that is not a spot on description of what we are witnessing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue
It is so, so very tragic. People have still not realized what has happened. People are calming down when they should be panicking. The implications of this episode, just for our prospects of surviving Climate Change, are tragic.
Edit: words
But it's dangerous to generalize. I know a lot of older people who are incredibly technologically savvy and younger people who only care about the narcissistic and quick-consumption facets of technology.
This doesn't apply to all older people, of course. But on aggregate, I would agree with you.
If Google really wants to organize the worlds information and make it usable for everybody, they have to make sure Google news is a news source you can trust. Pagerank is not going to cut it.
A couple of suggestions:
- prevent less reputable websites from showing up for political queries at all
- ignore articles with headlines in ALL CAPS
- work with a dedicated team of editors, like politifact, to give websites an honestyrank
- be transparent, show honesty rank in the search results
Any other ideas?
source: run a legitimate news site built on Wordpress.
http://www.infowars.com/
http://usdefensewatch.com/
http://therealstrategy.com/
http://www.neonnettle.com/
I thought the "news" results were supposed to be at least vaguely curated, and weren't just another way to show results from the entire web. How did 70news.wordpress.com end up in Google's list of "news" sites?
Edit: actually, it's still there if I use a desktop browser. It's on the main results page, but in the "in the news" section, not just in the main results.
It is really no different then losing trust. If you assume a service as a bias, like say promoting an agenda you disagree with. You may start using that service less and less. Google combats this with individual search preferences. So it's search results rarely leave your internet safe space.
If you promote a honesty index you lose this safe guard. Suddenly search results will challenge people's opinions, and they may stop using the service.
- Stop censoring searches based on political party
- Stop working directly with political parties
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/12403
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-01/wikileaks-reveals-g...
It's really sketchy of zero hedge to suggest that. Reading another article of theirs shows the same pattern. Leave the reader to make their own incorrect conclusions without providing any context. The article I'm seeing shows them quoting Putin who says that the west should allow for open discussion on all issues, instead of cracking down on his propaganda networks operating in the west. What hypocrisy! Russian media is one of the least free in the world! Zero hedge just lets him have the final word on their article, the reader left nodding his head in agreement with that Putin who tells the west how it really is. Disgusting.
It turns out that PolitiFact is run by people who have their own unconscious biases and put their own thumbs on the scale. So now what?
Of course, people who don't want to hear the truth -- most Trump supporters, in my experience -- will deny reality or will try to undermine it in non-truthful ways.
As a matter of fact, there are several other honest fact-checking sites besides Politifact. It would be somewhat interesting if these disagreed with Politifact's judgments, but they don't.
For example, I don't think they touched the claim that Trump has a secret communication channel with Russia, even though Clinton repeated it and demanded the FBI investigate it. (It was actually an entirely ordinary bulk email server sending out ads for Trump hotels.) A lot of people still seem to believe that one and think the FBI's rejection of it is proof they were conspiring to elect Trujmp.
Either way, it's certainly true that Trump repeatedly praised Putin, quoted Russian propaganda, disbelieved US intelligence about Russian hacking (it might have been an obese guy in a basement) and did nothing to disprove his links with Russia. This included being too scared to show his tax returns, which hasn't happened since Nixon.
At least when you elected Nixon, you didn't know he was a crook.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...
Putting aside sneering, though: let's assume for the sake of argument that PolitiFact really is neutral. And Google hires them to put a trustworthiness rating next to news search results. How many days pass before $YOUR_LEAST_FAVORITE_POLITICAL_FORCE realizes that PolitiFact is a single point of failure and starts scheming to influence it? Put it another way, they may be neutral today, but that's hardly a guarantee they'll be neutral tomorrow.
Doesn't work like that. Politifact takes a consensus of people who are experts in the topic, and its answers are subject both to peer review and to corrections from outside sources.
> Do you think that sneering at people who have an issue with PolitiFact is going to win them over to your side?
I'm damned sure that neither facts nor rational arguments are going to win them over, because they have been conned by a pathological liar. And as I pointed out above, he's a liar who has been supported by a lying alt-right media.
They live in the same sort of truth-free alternate reality as the whackjobs who believe in con-trails, think the moon landings were faked, believe Obama was born in Kenya, and don't believe in evolution.
As the judge in the Trump University fraud case pointed out: "victims of con artists often sing the praises of their victimizers until the moment they realize they have been fleeced".
And who decides which experts get to join the consensus, and which outside sources that proffer corrections should be listened to? You're dreaming if you think that a single-point-of-failure institution like this can ever be immune to the equivalent of regulatory capture.
> I'm damned sure that neither facts nor rational arguments are going to win them over, because they have been conned by a pathological liar. And as I pointed out above, he's a liar who has been supported by a lying alt-right media.
Yeah, see, that's the thing. We started at "We need a neutral, unbiased source of fact-checking!" and have reached the conclusion of "Because that'll help stick it to the people I hate!" In which case, one wonders how much "neutral, unbiased" was ever in the cards in the first place.
A lot of them are academics. They're not bozos dragged in off the streets. The approach isn't significantly different from how science works.
> In which case, one wonders how much "neutral, unbiased" was ever in the cards in the first place.
Spare me the bullshit. Facts are still facts. There's absolutely no rational way to pretend that Trump isn't a pathological liar.
I'm sure that would work fine : https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465
Ok, what's wrong with that? If that site/blog post has gained more traffic, social signals, backlinks, etc. etc than it's "competitors" shouldn't it naturally be top ranking?
Which is moot point until someone can scientifically prove the person who's calculations showed Hillary losing the popular vote are indeed inaccurate, correct?
It's like googling "moon landing date" and the first hit is a page that sincerely argues "the moon landing never happened."
And that's what I am confused about. Isn't google suppose to the show the most popular result based on a set of criteria?
edit: by "manual", I only know what it was like on the news outlet side. You had to fill out a form, provide a real address and phone for contact info among other bits of company info, and the wait was several days if not a week. It felt like the process one goes through when a human has to verify the info, like an iOS app.
I know since I run a site that had similar scenario.
Google does (in light gray) mention that there's still 20 electoral votes to account for. It does not, however, give any disclaimer to the very precise looking "popular vote" count[1], which will change significantly when those 20 EVs are finally accounted for, and change again if[1] more counting occurs. A whole lot of arguing is going on over that popular vote, which indications are actually puts Trump ahead even though Clinton is authoritatively presented by Google as having more. No major site is showing Trump having the 306 EVs which he will undoubtedly have; the stalling at this point is getting suspicious.
[1] - To clarify: the USA presidential election does not establish a winner from the straight count of all voters. Since we are the United States, voters in each state vote in their jurisdiction, the state decides how to handle the results, and then each state submits a set of votes (weighted by population in a way to ensure low-population states aren't invariably washed out by a dozen major cities elsewhere). We don't necessarily complete the vote count because, mathematically, there comes a point (usually) where the remaining votes simply don't matter (say, candidate T is ahead by 200,000 votes and there are 100,000 votes remaining to count) because the allocation of the state's electoral votes are provably complete (and because counting every vote usually gets pretty messy at the end; look up "hanging chad").
Also, consider Google often tries to answer questions based on text from high-ranking results. So while final election results may get you the Knowledge Graph section, asking a specific question about the election results may inadvertently cause Google to source it's answer from a bad link like 70news.
Chesterton's fence strikes again.[0]
The electoral college addresses a real issue, and "the electoral college is a ridiculous system" is not an argument for removing/replacing it.
If you want to see the electoral college replaced or reformed, you need to at least demonstrate that you understand why it exists in the first place.
Hint: it's not because they weren't aware of the simpler "winner takes all" approach with the popular vote.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
The real issue it (along with the 3/5 compromise, the structure of the Senate, and the limited term explicit protection of the slave trade in the original Constitution) addressed is that, in the early US, slavery wasn't all that popular in the states that were more urbanized and had economies and value systems that supported growth in the enfranchised population, so the system had to be skewed to protect the masters in the disenfranchising states for theme to feel secure in their "peculiar institution", even if that meant sacrificing the ideal of equality even among the enfranchised citizenry.
The 3/5 compromise was used to calculate the population-based component of governance, and at any rate, is no longer used so completely irrelevant today.
I gave more details is this response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12969671
The electoral college was created as a part of the three fifths compromise. In order to get southern states on board, the framers needed to find a clever way to count slaves as population without letting them vote. Three-fifths plus the electoral college let them do that. It's an ugly hack that should be patched.
And don't give me any of that "republic" crap. As if anyone has any idea who their electors are, or cares. No voter honestly thinks they are selecting an elector qualified to relay popular opinion to the government. They're voting for the president.
The EC was imagined in an era where people thought the government would be more a federation of states than a central government. That is not what we have today. The system does not make sense in the current context.
Maybe you'll play the "regional interests" card. Sure. Is it any more fair that a minority candidate can be elected by the less populous states, rather than having a majority candidate elected by the more populous states? No. It's a facile argument that falls apart with any examination.
Given the poor modern justification for the EC, and all of the negative externalities it causes (election of less popular candidates, voter suppression and apathy in partisan states, etc.), it deserves to be abolished.
The electoral college is not racist, either. The 3/5 compromise of course came into any situation where population was considered (including the electoral college), as the country still had slavery at the time. We no longer have that compromise: blacks, women, men without land, etc. can all vote in 2016.
Abandoning the electoral college would just weaken the States, and if that's the plan, we might as well abolish the Senate too—it exists because of the exact same principle.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...
> In Federalist No. 39, Madison argued the Constitution was designed to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. Congress would have two houses: the state-based Senate and the population-based House of Representatives. Meanwhile, the president would be elected by a mixture of the two modes.
a) There is a structural imbalance in how the electorate is represented, especially considering congressional district gerrymandering (not directly related to the race for President, I know, and ...
b) People are in shock that a racist and a demagogue has been elected as President and searching for confirmation that a majority of our fellow citizens do not in fact believe in the reprehensible and Un-American values which Donald Trump and his rise to power represent.
The more the Electoral College diverges from the popular vote, the better case you can make for changing the system. And on the other side, if somehow the counts were wrong and the popular vote did favor Trump, that would greatly undermine the argument for reform.
If I live in California, I'm less incentivized to show up for the election because I think of it as a lock. Obviously I should still show up to vote elsewhere on the ballot, but I may not because I won't influence the election.
If we were measuring by popular vote, turnout would be a lot higher and the outcome would, likely, be a better representation of the country.
The electoral college distribute power, to some degree, based on geography. Geography is correlated with a large number of other "diversities" of American culture, from race, population density, to industry, to global warming risk, etc... Switching it to a straight majority would take power away from all of these subsets of society.
This election, it seems, it was "white rust belt" Americans that decided the election. In Gore vs Bush, it was Florida. Next time, it will be something else. It's all highly imperfect and somewhat random, but I see danger in solidifying power in what essentially will be people who live in cities.
And Trump does have a mandate. The system is at it is - it has been like that since the very beginning of this country. I may not agree personally, but he won, and I really don't see any positive point in attempts that try to reinterpret the result. Remember, some day the roles may be switched.
If anything, I think the current system suppresses the vote. I'm in a red state so my vote never counts.
Obviously it's too late for any change to the electoral college to affect this election. But we could know this in the future. You make what you measure and we're measuring the wrong thing.
Agreed. For most of us who wish to change or abolish the electoral college, the fact that people feel (mostly accurately) that their vote doesn't matter, and therefore don't participate in the electoral process, is the primary problem we would like to address.
To me, it seems that the people that should be pissed are the ones in swing states, since the winner-take-all nature of the EC means half of those states are completely un-represented.
Can someone point me out as why Americans differentiate republic from direct democracy? I reckon than in most of the world these words don't mean opposites. Republic means just "not a monarchy/aristocracy" where I live, and I reckon in most of the world.
(This is a genuine question, maybe there is a reason for the American usage of the term)
No, if there's an elected representative government, it's generally a representative democracy. Even when (as in the case of the UK) it's also a Constitutional monarchy, and so not a republic of any kind.
A direct democracy is one where voters vote directly on issues rather than representatives who make decisions on issues; basically no one thinks the US is like this, though many individual states in the US incorporate some degree of direct democracy via initiative and referendum.
I think it would be more accurate than your formulation to say "We are a federal republic with a very loose approximation of representative democracy, but most people think we are, or at least should be, a representative democracy (which would still be a federal republic, but also a democratic republic.)"
The US was created to be something like the EU: a confederation of states.
Everyone intuitively understands that Luxembourg and Malta need to have protections in the EU so that Germany and France don't always get their way. The only way to achieve this is to have some disproportionate representation for the smaller member states.
In the US we have become much more centralized since WWII and FDR and now we seem more like a regular country with a unified power structure. But the system we're built upon is still designed for a group of largely autonomous states.
Well, as much as is possible given the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 24th Amendments. But they also need to understand that the Electoral College was designed to reward disenfranchisement (which it still does) and protect slavery (which, at least in formal terms, it no longer does.)
The electoral college was indeed intended to ensure representation for all of the states, but it is definitely not working the way it was originally designed.
The original design assumed that the voters would vote for electors by name (i.e. the electors' names would be on the ballot, not the candidates' names), and the chosen electors would exercise independent judgment and vote for the candidate they thought would be the best president. We know this is the original intention, because the people who designed the electoral college wrote about this at length.
When some states started putting the names of the presidential candidates on the ballots instead of the names of the electors, James Madison and the other people who designed the electoral college were very unhappy about it. They felt so strongly about it that they proposed amending the constitution to require that ballots contain the electors' names rather than the candidates' names.
When electors are bound to vote for a certain candidate, it's clear that the electoral college is not working as it was originally designed.
If the elecrotates choose Trump, the electoral college will have failed its final test.
Abraham Lincoln with 39.8%.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
They also have a bug with the interpretation links to snopes.com that has been reported to them[1]. I wonder if that affects any other site? I would doubt it would be just one.
1) after filling out their form on news.google.com, I posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12384851
What if the real news list chooser doesn't like a certain website, so they black list it?
Isn't trying to control this unintentional or maybe even intentional censorship?
If someone else gets to decide its censorship.
Here's one:
http://heavy.com/news/2016/09/keith-lamont-scott-charlotte-n...
Entirely cribbed from real news sites' coverage when it's not just innuendo. And yet when the news is fresh, Heavy.com is almost always at the top, beating out original coverage and even sites that do it much better (DailyMail comes to mind).
I get that prioritized placement of proper nouns in the headline and page title can boost SERP, but this is ridiculously effective SEO-gaming, the likes which were mostly stopped when Google's Panda was thought to drastically hurt content farms like Demand Media [0]
Even the article the WaPo screenshot, which is the very first link for "clinton vs trump", is just fluff:
http://heavy.com/news/2016/11/popular-vote-clinton-trump-hil...
The first 3 lines:
> There are millions of ballots that haven’t been counted yet from the 2016 presidential election. How many? The New York Times estimated on November 12 that there are 7 million uncounted ballots in the country.
How is this beating actual URLs to live poling data that have Clinton vs Trump in the title?
[0] http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-costly-11206...
Except that is it something that happens via automation rather than through methods listed in the book. Still the book is a good read if just to get acquainted with how one can manipulate media in this day and age.
The Trump bubble has to burst eventually and I think the American's that voted for him are in for a rude awakening when it does. I just hope the fallout doesn't bring down too much of the country.