My first thought after election day was that Brandolini's Law had been successfully weaponized, and that Firaxis should get busy adding it to the tech tree in Civ 6.
Sam Biddle wrote an article[1] in The Intercept recently where he uses a phrase that would be a great name for this new tech:"Internet-Augmented Ignorance"
The clickbait phenomenon appears to be a much bigger problem today than it did a week ago. A week ago, I thought of it as a mere annoyance. Now I fear it is an existential threat – especially in light of Zuckerberg's take:
"I think the idea that fake news on Facebook—of which it’s a very small amount of the content—influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea."
The article that I linked to may be one that not everybody agrees with, but it is a well-written and thoughtful article that isn't anywhere near the clickbait-farm model.
If the problem were merely that people selectively shared thoughtful but biased articles within their own information bubble, the problem would not be so severe.
The clickbait problem, in contrast, is that people share – within milliseconds - articles that are designed merely to siphon money from that dopamine hit, with no good-faith effort to even make any sense whatsoever.
What is the big-O of rolling back bullshit viral posts?
The viral posts get to spread organically, at a rate through the social graph equal to the appeal chance.
However, to refute it, you must first research the response with sufficient veracity / references. That is probably the original 10x.
But then you must move the refutation, which seems to have a much reduced virality factor, to the necessary places the viral bullshit spread.
That would require constant searches of the graph. If the graph is "secured", then locating the instances/replications of the viral bullshit could be practically impossible.
Even if you had access, the viral bullshit can replicate, since the very thing that makes it viral makes it memorable, and you'd need to do constant sweeps of the social graph to repress it.
this analysis completely ignores the fact that reddit.com is the 8th largest website in the united states and a primary source of news for large portions of its users. And I'm sure that pretty much every reddit user ever can attest that multiple viewpoints on political issues were HEAVILY debated and often led to flamewars.
just saying that this is direct evidence against the article's conclusions.
I strongly disagree re: heavily debated. /r/politics was literally moderated by paid shills. /r/the_donald and /r/hillaryclinton immediately banned and deleted all dissenting comments. Most subreddits explicitly chose a side and deleted opposing viewpoints, e.g. /r/trees deleting anti-Clinton (pro-weed) posts. To me, this is just more evidence of the polarization of politics (I am obviously on the right side, and my opponent is so abhorrent that silencing them is justified).
A flamewar is not a real connection of opposing sides that lets each understand the other, it's a progressive back-and-forth of increasingly simplified versions of the other's position until both sides hate each other more than when they started. It's still a part of the echo chamber phenomenon; just because there are people who hate each other shouting at each other, doesn't mean the inherent structure of the medium won't make each more rigid in their views.
It's funny how leftists think that democracy is "broken" because they favourite candidate has lost democratic elections :) The truth is exactly the opposite: the fact that candidate so despised by elites, media, lobbysts has won with votes of common people is a sign that the democracy is working better than ever.
Why do you assume that? The conclusion sounds correct, the bubbles favor candidates that have no chance otherwise, because the bubbles protect people from outside influence. Essentially making "democracy" more "democratic".
I believe, as many do, that the health of a democracy is a function of the degree to which the citizenry is informed. Votes were cast, yes, and a candidate was selected. Those are necessary conditions for a healthy democracy – but not sufficient.
The candidate that was selected showed himself during the campaign to be entirely unmoored from factual reality or consistency, and somehow he paid no political consequences for that.
This is important for reasons above & beyond whether one's own candidate won or lost.
True. But don't forget how flawed Hillary was as a candidate.
All the scandals. Too uncharismatic and un-empathetic to really resonate with voters. (It would not be a stretch to compare her to Kerry in this category.) She was completely an establishment candidate at a time of great anti-establishment sentiment. And the DNC put her on the express path to the nomination, which turned off a big chunk of her own party, and thereby (I strongly suspect) reduced turnout.
With all those flaws, it's a measure of Trump's weakness that Hillary came as close as she did...
The losing candidate had negatives too, both in terms of messaging (that whole 'basket of deplorables' fracas) and scandals (pay-for-play at State). Also she was in the pocket of the banksters and wall street. Also she was promising a 3rd Obama term. And on, and on ...
I don't like all this recent talk about how Comey sunk Clinton's candidacy or some right wing FBI agent conspiracy did her in. She owns all her scandals, it's her job to defend and sell her brand.
I took it she thought the presidency was a foregone conclusion and she felt should could let the email thing fester for months with evolving excuses without taking any serious damage. The unanswered drip-drip Wikileaks revelations with DNC bag ladies and Media shills dropping like flies all around her didn't help either.
I didn't have a dog in the fight, I didn't vote for either Clinton nor Trump. Both the candidates were super negative. I believe if the Democrats put up someone with a modicum of positive energy (Bernie, perhaps?) Trump would not have been elected.
You're assuming "outside influence" is the same thing as "different views". For example, in information ops you only have to use sensemaking on a target (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking) to feed little bits of info or ideas that favor your goal. The end result is that the target feels protected from outside influence but it's anything but.
I didn't assume that. News bubbles give people a way to not be subjected to some external influence, which is not to say they are not subjected to any influence, it just makes a choice of which influence they are subjected to more random and different. Traditional media, on the other hand, being less bubbly and exposing everyone to their ideas favors money and gives unfair advantage to elites and not outsiders.
More people voted for Hillary than Trump. This is the second time in 16 years that a candidate has received the popular vote but lost the election. It didn't happen once in the 20th century. The system is in fact broken at this point, thanks to voting rights suppression, gerrymandering, and the sheer madness that is the Electoral College. Even Trump himself in his 60 Minutes interview on Sunday said he would prefer a system in which the popular vote determined the winner, even after his victory.
I agree that the system needs to change, but you should also take into consideration that the purpose of the electoral college is to prop up the power of smaller states that don't have large populations, as minority opinions are important too. How people vote is partially a reflection of who the campaigns addressed. Because it's the electoral college that counts, candidates campaign to win the electoral college, not the popular vote. If the popular vote won the presidency, campaigns would adjust their strategy to address the popular vote. This would mean less focus on swing states and more focus on addressing the population overall.
Trump winning while losing the popular vote is the system working as intended, but we can definitely debate whether those intentions were good and if the reasons for the system still apply today. The political situation is very different now from when the electoral college was implemented. As it stands, it's entirely up to the states to change the laws binding their electors to the state popular vote. Eleven have already signed on to National Popular Vote Interstate Compact which would bind their electors to the national popular vote if enough states sign on.
If the popular vote won the presidency, campaigns would adjust their strategy to address the popular vote.
Exactly, these complaints are based on an unknowable counterfactual, that if the rules of the game were total votes, a Trump campaign based on them wouldn't have won.
All we know is that if you change the rules of the game after it's been played, Hillary "won".
Plus states generally don't count absentee ballots unless they could change election results (which wouldn't necessarily be for the presidential race), so we're only talking about votes counted, not votes cast. And absentee ballots strongly break Republican, like 2/3rds to 1/3rd from one source I just read.
While it may be an "unsourced rumor that has been making its way around social media.", it's also something I learned years ago, it's a simple and very obvious economy measure.
And whatever that Official Federal Government FAQ might say to, for example, encourage people to vote absentee, it has no bearing on the facts on the ground. The rules of which are, for Presidental elections, the sole prerogative of each state's legislature.
The fact that you learned it years ago doesn't change whether it's an unsourced rumor. Every single state certifies their ballot totals and every single state counts each vote. I challenge you to find a single state where their policy is to only count absentees in close races.
Popular vote is just not a useful metric. No one knows what the popular vote would be if that was the metric that mattered. Would more Californian Republicans step out? Would Austin, Texas Democrats vote? Would people in small, less populous states STOP voting? Who knows?
To say a metric we aren't optimising for shows X is not really anything more than a side effect of something else.
Personally I find this tone to be a part of the problem.
"Leftists" aren't saying anything proponents of the other party haven't said when their candidate loses.
The discussion at hand is about the imbalance in our election system as a whole. NOT this election.
There is ample data to suggest control of our government is not decided by the people put the parties. Gerrymandering and voter suppression are very real things. Both sides engage in it, but IMO the evidence suggests one party is "winning" more than the other because of it.
Candidates from outside these parties hardly have a voice thanks to these parties designing the rules around who is included.
That is a serious issue that's not being discussed on the whole.
Your comment is simply perpetuating the notion that things are fine and the other side is butt hurt. I somehow doubt in a world as complex as ours that's the easy answer. Especially when both sides are implicated by data that they're rigging the system.
It's not about a particular candidate for me. It's about a two party duopoly on our politics. If anyone wants to shake up the establishment, breaking that strangle hold is target. Not simply passing a baton to the candidate that appears more anti-establishment only for them to load up on pundits from an established party after the fact.
IMO the news media is only a system. The bigger issue has been here for years. It's our short term mentality when it comes to making decisions. Next quarter versus next year. Next election versus next generation.
This isn't a problem created by Twitter and 24/7 news. This has been going on since well before either existed. They've exacerbated it, but IMO the underlying issues are our deifying our economics. We don't talk about how to help each other directly. We just believe that growing our economy will magically make the world better.
No matter which side a player is on our system at the core right now is against the people. Not just us but our descendants. It's this short term vision of how to solve our problems (which usually means get the stock price up or some similar cold economic metric) and not about what's beneficial outside the bubble that is recent past and recent future.
One other contributor (and I hear this often repeated but rarely substantiated) was 24 news. There's only so many facts to present (and facts are difficult to find and vet). To fill the extra time they focused more on pundits and opinions. Since this was now a majority of the content each side got stronger and more polarized. I still think this has a stronger effect than people realize because not everyone uses computers.
I try to do what they recommend and it's tough to listen to both sides. They start with the basis you're already supporting them so they skip the "foundation" of their argument and the content generally is lies and condescension for the other (to be clear, I'm talking about both sides).
I don't believe the issue is an actual dearth of facts. The reality is (and presumably always will be) there are far too many facts to report them all, particularly in an entertaining way.
Editors must make a selection of which facts are relevant and interesting enough to make it into... whatever it is they're editing. When that's political news, that selection bias becomes more important. And in today's age, it can be so extreme that both sides are operating with inconsistent perspectives. Not because someone is lying or misleading.
/Then you add lying and misleading and the whole thing is a dumpster fire.
There's too many facts and not enough truth. There are enough individual facts, anecdotes, and incidents out there to support any possible narrative, and make people believe anything without directly lying to them. It's a serious problem of the information age that we have yet to fix.
Yes, there's more raw data there, but it's not always useful until it's aggregated and analyzed. Not everyone has time to sift through raw CSPAN footage or census data (I try). People (myself included) rely on sources for that. If some breaking news is happening, spotty raw data from the front lines can be really misleading about what's actually happening. You can also see the money draining out of traditional long-form reporting (and polls).
These outlets more and more rely on rhetoric, opinions, and emotions instead of facts.
I think part of it is that incentives are misaligned. I didn't want to throw shade on one side, but the Les Moonves quote, "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." I think in addition to a news businesses focusing on being the best and financially successful, there's focus in politics where the only goal for each side is on winning instead of being right or living up to some ideals.
I think the humans have been dividing themselves up into tribes for a long time. While technology isn't completely blameless, Technology does provide another avenue where humans establish and patrol boundaries via social cues. And those cues can maybe be magnified by tech and exploited by political parties on both sides.
I found this podcast particularly interesting (though maybe not 100% correct), but it discusses interesting urban/rural social and cultural boundaries. And I think it's fairly perceptive in the observation that completely unrelated political issues are bound together simply because they happened to fall on different sides of that cultural divide. I think that divide had formed long before the internet and certainly social media.
It was also recorded just before the election which additionally makes for some prophetic elements.
I completely agree. Humans will be humans and we will always have tribes. And that's okay. What needs to change is modern voting systems to accomadte the growing fractions of views. Such as, The Alternative Vote (Instant Run-off) [1] Also, The Cracked podcast is so fantastic!
The U.S. may appear to be a broken democracy to most but it is a functional constitutional republic. This was was the purposeful intent of the founders to safeguard the sovereign interests of the individual states.
34 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 92.3 ms ] threadSam Biddle wrote an article[1] in The Intercept recently where he uses a phrase that would be a great name for this new tech:"Internet-Augmented Ignorance"
The clickbait phenomenon appears to be a much bigger problem today than it did a week ago. A week ago, I thought of it as a mere annoyance. Now I fear it is an existential threat – especially in light of Zuckerberg's take:
"I think the idea that fake news on Facebook—of which it’s a very small amount of the content—influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea."
[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/10/facebook-im-begging-you-...
Well, leave it to the experts.
If the problem were merely that people selectively shared thoughtful but biased articles within their own information bubble, the problem would not be so severe.
The clickbait problem, in contrast, is that people share – within milliseconds - articles that are designed merely to siphon money from that dopamine hit, with no good-faith effort to even make any sense whatsoever.
The viral posts get to spread organically, at a rate through the social graph equal to the appeal chance.
However, to refute it, you must first research the response with sufficient veracity / references. That is probably the original 10x.
But then you must move the refutation, which seems to have a much reduced virality factor, to the necessary places the viral bullshit spread.
That would require constant searches of the graph. If the graph is "secured", then locating the instances/replications of the viral bullshit could be practically impossible.
Even if you had access, the viral bullshit can replicate, since the very thing that makes it viral makes it memorable, and you'd need to do constant sweeps of the social graph to repress it.
just saying that this is direct evidence against the article's conclusions.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com
Your observation that lively debate exists somewhere on Reddit is valid; no doubt about that.
It's a stretch to suggest that this is the common case for Reddit users, though.
Why not give the article a shot before insulting "the left"?
The candidate that was selected showed himself during the campaign to be entirely unmoored from factual reality or consistency, and somehow he paid no political consequences for that.
This is important for reasons above & beyond whether one's own candidate won or lost.
All the scandals. Too uncharismatic and un-empathetic to really resonate with voters. (It would not be a stretch to compare her to Kerry in this category.) She was completely an establishment candidate at a time of great anti-establishment sentiment. And the DNC put her on the express path to the nomination, which turned off a big chunk of her own party, and thereby (I strongly suspect) reduced turnout.
With all those flaws, it's a measure of Trump's weakness that Hillary came as close as she did...
I don't like all this recent talk about how Comey sunk Clinton's candidacy or some right wing FBI agent conspiracy did her in. She owns all her scandals, it's her job to defend and sell her brand.
I took it she thought the presidency was a foregone conclusion and she felt should could let the email thing fester for months with evolving excuses without taking any serious damage. The unanswered drip-drip Wikileaks revelations with DNC bag ladies and Media shills dropping like flies all around her didn't help either.
I didn't have a dog in the fight, I didn't vote for either Clinton nor Trump. Both the candidates were super negative. I believe if the Democrats put up someone with a modicum of positive energy (Bernie, perhaps?) Trump would not have been elected.
Trump winning while losing the popular vote is the system working as intended, but we can definitely debate whether those intentions were good and if the reasons for the system still apply today. The political situation is very different now from when the electoral college was implemented. As it stands, it's entirely up to the states to change the laws binding their electors to the state popular vote. Eleven have already signed on to National Popular Vote Interstate Compact which would bind their electors to the national popular vote if enough states sign on.
Exactly, these complaints are based on an unknowable counterfactual, that if the rules of the game were total votes, a Trump campaign based on them wouldn't have won. All we know is that if you change the rules of the game after it's been played, Hillary "won".
Plus states generally don't count absentee ballots unless they could change election results (which wouldn't necessarily be for the presidential race), so we're only talking about votes counted, not votes cast. And absentee ballots strongly break Republican, like 2/3rds to 1/3rd from one source I just read.
In case it isn't clear, yes, all ballots are counted in every election. Even absentee ballots. The idea that they're not counted is ludicrous.
https://www.fvap.gov/vao/vag/appendix/faq
And whatever that Official Federal Government FAQ might say to, for example, encourage people to vote absentee, it has no bearing on the facts on the ground. The rules of which are, for Presidental elections, the sole prerogative of each state's legislature.
To say a metric we aren't optimising for shows X is not really anything more than a side effect of something else.
"Leftists" aren't saying anything proponents of the other party haven't said when their candidate loses.
The discussion at hand is about the imbalance in our election system as a whole. NOT this election.
There is ample data to suggest control of our government is not decided by the people put the parties. Gerrymandering and voter suppression are very real things. Both sides engage in it, but IMO the evidence suggests one party is "winning" more than the other because of it.
Candidates from outside these parties hardly have a voice thanks to these parties designing the rules around who is included.
That is a serious issue that's not being discussed on the whole.
Your comment is simply perpetuating the notion that things are fine and the other side is butt hurt. I somehow doubt in a world as complex as ours that's the easy answer. Especially when both sides are implicated by data that they're rigging the system.
It's not about a particular candidate for me. It's about a two party duopoly on our politics. If anyone wants to shake up the establishment, breaking that strangle hold is target. Not simply passing a baton to the candidate that appears more anti-establishment only for them to load up on pundits from an established party after the fact.
IMO the news media is only a system. The bigger issue has been here for years. It's our short term mentality when it comes to making decisions. Next quarter versus next year. Next election versus next generation.
This isn't a problem created by Twitter and 24/7 news. This has been going on since well before either existed. They've exacerbated it, but IMO the underlying issues are our deifying our economics. We don't talk about how to help each other directly. We just believe that growing our economy will magically make the world better.
No matter which side a player is on our system at the core right now is against the people. Not just us but our descendants. It's this short term vision of how to solve our problems (which usually means get the stock price up or some similar cold economic metric) and not about what's beneficial outside the bubble that is recent past and recent future.
I try to do what they recommend and it's tough to listen to both sides. They start with the basis you're already supporting them so they skip the "foundation" of their argument and the content generally is lies and condescension for the other (to be clear, I'm talking about both sides).
Editors must make a selection of which facts are relevant and interesting enough to make it into... whatever it is they're editing. When that's political news, that selection bias becomes more important. And in today's age, it can be so extreme that both sides are operating with inconsistent perspectives. Not because someone is lying or misleading.
/Then you add lying and misleading and the whole thing is a dumpster fire.
These outlets more and more rely on rhetoric, opinions, and emotions instead of facts.
I think part of it is that incentives are misaligned. I didn't want to throw shade on one side, but the Les Moonves quote, "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." I think in addition to a news businesses focusing on being the best and financially successful, there's focus in politics where the only goal for each side is on winning instead of being right or living up to some ideals.
I found this podcast particularly interesting (though maybe not 100% correct), but it discusses interesting urban/rural social and cultural boundaries. And I think it's fairly perceptive in the observation that completely unrelated political issues are bound together simply because they happened to fall on different sides of that cultural divide. I think that divide had formed long before the internet and certainly social media.
It was also recorded just before the election which additionally makes for some prophetic elements.
Cracked Podcast #148 http://www.earwolf.com/episode/trump-country/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE