This article keeps ridiculously pushing the false narrative that Facebook and "the Russians" are responsible for the outcome of the 2016 election. The amount of placed advertisments on Facebook from shadowy Russian sources was miniscule and had nothing to do with the massive rallies of people and the media coverage of the Trump campaign. $100,000 of ad buys on Facebook swung the election and caused this horror?
It is such a dishonest narrative.
I thought it would be a story about the wider cultural effects of social media and Facebook, but it was more partisan conspiracy theories.
I'm disapointed in Vanity Fair for running this type of piece.
You’re doing exactly what the cloistered FB articles in the article are doing... just taking it as an assumption that the story is false and that you are under attack. How do you know this?
FWIW, I do agree that the wider cultural impact of Facebook is more important than any specific instance of foreign meddling, but that’s not the subject of the article. The article is about the people at Facebook, and if the Russian interference is what they are focusing on, even if they’re wrong, then that is what the article will mention.
There are plenty of stories about the social impact of Facebook if that’s the subject matter you want.
I am not. Facebook released numbers about their political ads and they don't stack up in any way with the kind of narrative Vanity Fair is trying to spin.
> Given the resources available to these state actors, isn’t it possible that the easily tracked $100k spend is the tip of an iceberg?
No. That would be a conspiracy theory.
And beyond the miniscule amount in ad spending, you also have to accept that a small number of political ads on Facebook swung the election in the States that Clinton lost.
How are you so certain that new information won't come out about this? What do you base that on?
If there's one constant in the investigations, it is the steady drip of new facts. In fact, it is self-assured reactions like the above that have destroyed a lot of people's credibility on the topic.
Anything might be revealed in the future. Someone might prove that Trump was brainwashed and programmed by Russia, or that Hillary ordered the murder of Seth Rich.
That's just speculation. We can only base rational discussion on the information available to us now.
And the two parties spent $2.5 billion on an election in which about 125 million votes were cast. $20 per vote.
At that rate, even if the Russians ads we're discussing had all been targeted at the Presidential election in those 3 states (far from true), that only equals about 5,000 votes.
Further assuming that 2/3's of votes aren't changeable and the $2.5 billion was spent to influence the remaining third, we're talking about 1500 votes influenced.
If we're smuggling in finance terms, I'd call it closer to investment than speculation. There is a near-certainty Mueller's team isn't noodling over nothing, and the targets of their investigation are acting in ways that are consistent with there being some there there. And that's only one investigation.
And I brought up credibility because one important facet that seems to be serially forgotten is that the major targets of the investigations have already destroyed their credibility, as have many commentators. I would encourage some googling to look at the past claims people make - more often than not you're hearing assertions of tribal fidelity rather than arguments based on factual exploration, and one bit of that information available to us now is a fair amount of background on motivations.
> We can only base rational discussion on the information available to us now.
This is false. We are planning animals. We do what-if projections constantly. In fact, we can't not do it - you did it yourself to make an implicit argument above attempting to make any forward-looking seem silly.
If Russian influence is purely a conspiracy theory, you have to explain why the FBI, the previous President, multiple Senators on relevant committees, and other Americans with access to confidential information are propagating it. And then you’re right back in conspiracy theory territory.
Conspiracy theory? How so? We know that Russia spent some amount >= $100,000 on campaign ads, and guessing the actual amount comes down to how good you think Facebook is at resolving accounts to people who don't want to be found. I don't think it's completely unreasonably to think that the actual amount of Russian spending was on the order of $1-10 million.
But that's not even significant when you look at the billions spent by U.S. campaigns and orgs. Few hundred thousand from Russia isn't enough to do anything.
There is a problem right there, if there was state funded/directed interference in US elections then Facebook have every incentive to downplay and hide this.
How many times in the last 2-3 years has facebook claimed there was no problem with something, and then later changed their story?
Off the top of my head I can think of at least two instances where they blatantly miscounted the amount they charged advertisers for paid traffic they never sent, and that's without even getting into zuck's wild claims that fb had zero effect on the 2016 election, and then months later admitting that was completely wrong.
There is very little reason to trust 'facebook releasing numbers' on this issue. They have EVERY reason to obfuscate, stall, and misreport on it - they are complicit in an extremely serious federal crime.
While I agree with both the GP and your post, it seems worthwhile to note that GP isn't attacking the individuals for their views, even if wrong. He's attacking Vanity Fair's decision that their opinions are newsworthy, especially when they appear to push a strong narrative.
True. The difference in scope, however, is critical.
One was rather irrelevant, while the other will result in more distant relations with our Cold War rival, serious witch-hunting, and most importantly: further polarization of the U.S. political climate.
And perhaps more pernicious than the disrespect to the man while in office is the way it has tainted everything he did. Obamacare, modeled after a Republican health care reform, must be repealed; the Iran deal must be torn up; hell, they didn't even let him put a Supreme Court Justice on the bench.
The GOP basically decided that Kenyan-born interloper was illegitimate and thus everything he did was too.
And then they elected the guy that made those claims popular again!
Remember, birtherism was relegated to the fringe (basically just Orly Taitz) until Trump revived it in 2011 and nearly started beating Romney in the polls. Sure enough, the same thing happened when he called Mexicans and illegal immigrants rapists and murderers.
People are fooling themselves if they think a big part of Trumps ascendancy isn’t pure racial animus.
I still think his ascendancy is due to economic depression in the interior. This isn't mutually exclusive with your view though. Racism and xenophobia are always ascendant during times of economic stress, and the state sometimes encourages this as a place to direct the peoples' anger. Trump and Bannon are selling an old brand of opiate.
The left has needed a scapegoat since election night.
It has ranged from:
* Bernie Sanders (second pick for Democrat candidate)
* James Comey (former FBI Director)
* Huma Abedin (deputy chief of staff for Clinton Campaign)
* Russian hackers
* Vladimir Putin (President of Russia)
* Wikileaks (ie: more Russian hackers)
* the Benghazi Committee
* the "Basket of Deplorables" (ie: white America)
* white women (ie: 53% of white women voted for Trump)
* white men (ie: universally reviled by progressive supremacists everywhere)
It seems the Democratic Party will never recover as it is more fragmented than ever, with ailing Nancy Pelosi and out-of-touch NYC urbanite Chuck Schumer being the only notable Democrats as of late. All they can do is respond with righteous indignation rather than form a coherent party platform, especially given extremists of all flavors left-of-center being unable to form anything beyond a rickety coalition under shredded banner of "Democrat."
Self-reflection and soul-searching is totally beyond the left's comprehension.
Clinton was just an awful candidate and the shrieking of the liberal media -- from WaPo to CNN to has-been celebrities -- was (and continues to be) tasteless. Whether Clinton's campaign was ever more than "shame on everybody that won't vote for me, also it's a woman's turn now" is irrelevant because that was the only message that got out there.
I would love to see a candidate campaign on, specifically, "tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect." The Democratic Party has truly abandoned tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect, and returning to it would go a long way to bridging the ever-widening gap between Democrats and Republicans.
Understand "left" as a political marketing strategy rather than a political ideology, and referring to the Democrats as left wing will make sense to you again.
This is very complicated. In my country we do have a progressive/popular left wing and a liberal/conservative right wing, but people following the discussion in the US thinks the liberal right are left wing. It makes our political discussion go very low.
Well that's precisely it. The political spectrum is quite well defined. One doesn't become left in the absence of an actual left. It's not a wholly relative measurement. Blue doesn't become green in the absence of green.
I don't think the political spectrum is in any way well defined - you can come up with left- or right-sounding justifications for pretty much any specific policy you care to, and if you look back across the decades or to different countries, you can make left or right mean anything you want. The only consistency is that the left pretends to care about the poor, while the right pretends to be competent.
That phrase didn't refer to "white America"-- it referred to white supremacists.
The problem was that Clinton rankly speculated that half of Trump's supporters were made up of white supremacists, in a futile effort to divide his base. And later in that same paragraph she said this:
"He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million."
Even if Clinton's statistics were even close to correct, it was a counterproductive statement. Trump voters who were white supremacists were energized by being attacked directly by Clinton. Trump voters who were not white supremacists were energized by the likelihood that Clinton was exaggerating the numbers to spread FUD and misdirect from her own historically low polling numbers as a presidential candidate. And Bernie supporters who were on the fence wondered why Clinton was name-calling Trump supporters when a large part of Bernie's appeal had been the exact opposite kind of behavior-- instead employing care and caution when referring to the grievances of Trump supporters-- as a primary candidate.
But more importantly, presidential candidates don't just improvise new phrases like that in the middle of speeches. Has there been anything written about who authored that phrase for Clinton and why they did it?
And any white man who voted for Trump was labeled a white supremacist and went in the basket. Just like any vocal supporter is labeled a Nazi. It's a joke.
If someone is critical of arbitrary elevation of black and latino people above white people, are they racist?
If someone is critical of arbitrary elevation of women above men, are they racist?
If someone is critical of unrestricted immigration, are they xenophobic?
If someone is critical of violent political expression steeped in Islamic ideology, are they Islamophobic?
---
Let me be clear, I am by no means advocating that one particular race is superior over another and I wholeheartedly reject discrimination and prejudice based on race or ethnicity.
Furthermore, I am all for protecting women from sexual violence and ensuring women have the right to vote, right to hold public office, right have equal rights in family law, and so many other rights and freedoms that women (and men!) have fought for.
Additionally, I am all for legal immigration where (for example) high-value applicants are expedited.
And finally, I have absolutely no dislike or fear of Islamic cultures and peoples, nor do I regard Islam as a dangerous political force.
In addition to "tolerance, shared responsibility and mutual respect" it would be awesome to see a candidate with a platform that was fiscally conservative and socially liberal (i.e. the middle) which is what I think most Americans have wanted for decades.
Unfortunately, wedge politics and the two party system has driven the electorate to a game of political ping pong for those same decades in a single file march toward an ever increasing indebted, imperialistic, totalitarian police state
It's really actually quite difficult to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
You can be fiscally conservative and socially neutral maybe or socially laissez faire but not socially progressive or socially liberal.
If you want social liberalism, money has to be spent on programs that enable social progress or has to be spent on enforcement of socially liberal laws and regulations, (history has shown it won't happen otherwise). This is the opposite of what we know fiscal conservatism to be in America.
I know this sounds nitpickish, but the closest you can get is to say something like I want liberal policies as cheaply as possible and unfortunately for those who want to claim the middle with that, that's essentially the policy of liberalism and the left. That's what liberals want too...
What socially liberal, fiscally conservative generally means is I don't care what you do but I don't wanna pay for it and that's not the middle, that's libertarian.
Sorry for the rant but I'm generally tired of seeing a claim for the middle being used as a substitute for I want socially liberal policies but I don't want to feel bad about not fully supporting them because I don't wanna give up any money...
This probably isn't you of course, but it sure is a lot of people who claim to be "socially liberal, fiscally conservative"
Your definition of socially liberal is quite different from most people’s.. every time I see this it just seems like arguing with yourself for the sake of arguing.
I don't buy that social liberalism and expensive welfare programs go hand in hand. It is entirely within the realm of possibility to broach society with progressivism sans nanny state sans righteous indignation.
While libertarian ideology may be akin to some brand of utilitarian nihilism, we don't have to lower ourselves to that level of impersonal cold distance. Government need not be devoid of personality for us to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
We don't need to give way to expensive social welfare programs in order to have a clean conscience.
The primary difference between being socially liberal and socially conservative is the idea of the government’s role in our lives (and more generally, collectivism vs. individualism). The socially liberal concepts of universal health care, social security, welfare, public schools and universities, environmental regulations and others all require funding in the form of taxation and then spending in form of government programs.
This type of taxation and the growth of government spending goes against the basic principles of fiscal conservatism.
Until robot-powered post-scarcity and UI changes the fundamental structure of society and government, social liberalism and fiscal conservatism is a paradox.
When I think of liberal, I think of people like Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. I realize my US-bias is showing, but when the country was founded the idea of a country where liberty was to be maximized was inconceivable. Currently, the people called conservatives are trying to conserve the liberal ideas of the late 18th century.
According to Wikipedia,
"Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties under the rule of law with an emphasis on economic freedom."
I think universal health care is fundamentally incompatible with both civil liberties and economic freedom.
What some consider progress, like more centralized power from elites that live X,000s miles away, others consider a regression. The biggest problem with monarchies was not their bloodline-based successions or validation by the Pope, it was their highly-centralized power.
This election proved that socially liberal fiscally conservative is far less appealing to most libertarians seem to think. Trump went back to “deficits don’t matter” - not just in office like Bush and Reagan and co but on the campaign trail!
NYC urbanite? Hmm that sounds like another politician I know.
> awful candidate
An awful candidate wouldn’t win the PV
> shrieking of the liberal media
You’re aware that the National Review had a cover story dedicated to stopping Trump right? Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, Goerge Will and David Brooks all opposed him through today.
> tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect
That sounds a lot like “Stronger Together”, the slogan of the defeated candidate.
Not only were the amount of ads bought miniscule, Russia simply wouldn't have the ability to target them nearly as well as the Trump campaign could. While there was a conspiracy theory going around on social media that Russia had used hacked copies of the electoral registrations to micro-target voters, it was ridiculous - political campaigns have official access to that data and have to spend huge amounts of volunteer time collecting enough info to do even basic targeting because it simply doesn't exist otherwise. (Which is why a newer conspiracy theory says the Trump campaign gave them the targeting info.)
Exactly, like most conspiracy theories they will continue to retrofit the narrative to match the evidence, no matter how weak the connection, then they'll just fill in the gaps with imagination.
Takes about 10 seconds for any digital marketer to look at the spend and reach and call bs. Unless of course they have some ominous fantasy of this 'only being the tip of the iceberg'
I think the focus on "fake news" is in part a deflection from the mainstream media's own poor coverage of the 2016 race. For instance, all of the coverage the week before the election was about how Comey's bombshell letter upended the race - yet in the end, that letter turned out to be nothing.
It's a little unsettling to see the media do a terrible job, scream "look over their!", and then try to present themselves as the great defenders of American democracy.
Totally agree; it was too obvious after the upset Trump victory when the Dems immediately started going down the list of scapegoats – especially Russia. I really don't think Russia's influence comes close to domestic influence, especially after looking at the billions spent by the U.S. campaigns.
And I've been very disappointed in U.S. mainstream press for repeating these partisan talking points with very little objective analysis. They complain about RT meddling in our election but our own consolidated media has opened the door to all of this IMO.
>People who know Zuckerberg think he’s losing touch with what it’s like to suffer real loss, and that he’s on his way to becoming a modern-day Howard Hughes
It's also pretty denigrating of Hughes. Hughes set aviation records, made major Hollywood films (as an outsider), designed really impressive planes and ran a diverse and massive empire before he was 45. Howard Hughes became that shell they are referring to because he broke most of the bones in his body in a plane crash, barely survived, got addicted to painkillers, and had an undiagnosed mental disorder.
Zuckerberg just has a bad case of affluenza, always has.
Zuckerberg created one of the largest multinational corporations from scratch, has data on billions of people, and is one of the richest people on the planet. Implying that he hasn't done much in his lifetime is pretty disingenuous. Sure, he was lucky, but you can't be a bumbling idiot and gain that kind of power.
Good Lord can't these media outlets accept reality. HRC lost, deal with it. In almost no way is the left's frustration over a Trump presidency different or more justified than the right's was over the Obama presidency. My advice to the left and their media fronts; quit screaming "RUSSIANS" and develop a platform that works for the fly over states and not just the coasts.
I'd also be interested in understanding why you think it's not appropriate for HN.
Many others share GP's view that the whole Russia thing is potentially overblown. Personally, I'm still rather skeptical of the whole matter, considering I haven't been presented with sufficiently strong evidence to make me agree that it played a large role in the 2016 election.
> I'd also be interested in understanding why you think it's not appropriate for HN.
Because this kind of comment usually incites a debate that is below the intellectual standards of HN.
This is not a statement about the comment's merit. Just a few days ago, there was a submission about how the US and Israel are leaving UNESCO. I was initially disappointed to see it being flagged off the front page because I was hoping for some insightful commentary on this development, but 90% of comments was arguing about whether there is a Jewish world conspiracy going on. That's why political stories and comments are very often flagged or downvoted to death.
Oh please help us all. Is the following really any better?
Can someone please explain why the left's frustration over a Trump presidency is any more justified than the right's was over the Obama presidency. And can they also explain how screaming "RUSSIANS" is better than developing a platform that works for the fly over states and not just the coasts.
Honestly, is couching everything in the Socratic method the blessed way to comment on HN?
Sometimes I don't want to discuss I just want to make a statement.
Because Trump is woefully unqualified for the job? Because the words he uses matter and he lies constantly?
Even if I agreed with the man's vile philosophy, if I was a supporter I would be frankly embarrassed by the man's performance. He is not even able to staff his branch of government.
The man is a failure by every metric. I am speaking now more to the "frustration" over a Trump presidency that the entire country has, not "the left" as you identify them.
I’m always caught of guard when the left-right scale is brought up in the context of American politics. Is so far skewed to the right that “the left” corresponds to “moderate-far right wing” in EU terms.
The American political spectrum is different than the European one. Go back almost 250 years and the U.S. was a constitutional republic with explicit individual rights. It was populated by people who felt persecuted by their religion, indentured servants, entrepreneurs, and slaves oppressed by people who were "looking out for them". The U.S. has never really had too many neighbors to distinguish itself from. It was never centered around a language, race, religion, royal bloodline, or ethnic identity.
250 years ago, Europe was still ruled by kings.
Basically, contrast the American revolution to the French one.
Anyway, the American right has generally been for preserving liberal democracy, not a monarchy or a cultural identity. Trump is a bit of an exception to this pattern, and doesn't have full support from the Republican party in the aspects of his politics that mirror the European right's (building walls, America first, etc.). The fact that the American congress has problems passing significant legislation demonstrates this fact.
It seems that the biggest difference between the American right and left is whether to preserve the wealth of the rich at all costs, or whether to prioritise some other objectives ahead of that.
Protecting the rich is very bipartisan. There is plenty of evidence of that, but the Wall Street bailouts we're certainly supported by both parties in Congress. Likewise, incumbent friendly policies were implemented by Bush and adopted by Obama.
There are honestly few reasons to be frustrated about Trump's presidency, and the left harping on HRC's loss is silly.
It's not like he proudly boasted about his sexual assaults. Nor has he spoken at conferences for white supremacists. He hasn't even said that Mexicans are rapists
and drug dealers (and some, he assumes, are good people). He definitely doesn't have a VP that supports gay conversion camps. And he isn't trying to take healthcare from millions of individuals.
Really, as a white man in the highest tax brackets, I have no reason at all to fear Trump, so why would anyone else?
I hope that was an attempt at sarcasm. I really do.
Because if not, let me rewrite your last sentence: "Really, as a member of the inoculated group, I have no reason to fear the plague, so why would anyone else?"
There was plenty wrong with Obama's presidency. The difference is that absolutely zero people had reason to believe that they were less than human due to his presidency. Ignoring that is asinine.
The fact that you don't see how people in communities that are devastated because of the opioids and that have been ignored or even insulted by the dems feel less than human proves the GP's point.
porfirium, Trump placed Jeff Sessions in charge of the latest drug war. If you wish to draw comparisons between this administration and the last you're not helping your cause.
Obviously nothing. But at least he didn't pretend those people didn't exist, he told him he'd fix them up. Pulling out from the Paris agreement is a step forward but there's so much to be done and it remains to be seen if he'll do something (I guess he won't)
"Like many C.E.O.s, Zuckerberg does run the risk of being aloof. In particular, Zuckerberg has few friends outside of Facebook. Beyond the time he spends with his wife and young children, he does very little that doesn’t, in some way, point back to his work at the company he runs. This sort of discipline becomes problematic when you learn that some of the people who surround Zuckerberg on a daily basis—the vast majority being current Facebook employees—seem to think (like Zuckerberg) that most of the Russian involvement in the election is overblown and that the company is being used as a scapegoat for a dysfunctional country..."
Ironic. Washington DC has the exact same problem: isolated, life in a bubble, mono-vision, etc.
Blaming FB and only FB is an oversimplification, to say the least, but it's a great spin that protects the elites (from their responsibility for the build up to Nov 2016 and all that has come to light since).
I assumed the story would be a critical oversight of Facebook as a whole, from employees' perspective. There are fundamental issues with any social media platform these days that goes beyond this particular case of foreign intervention.
How have filter bubbles changed our political landscape? How has the obsession for "likes" and "shares" incentivized certain speech over others? Has it diminished the variety of opinions? How do we create a platform that encourages people to step outside their comfort zone and learn things they may initially disagree with? How do we get people of differing opinions, who in our current world demonize each other, to sit down and share their stories and listen to? Is it even possible to build a popular platform that fights against our innate biases, like selection bias, confirmation bias, etc.?
Be the alleged Russian involvement as it may, I think that the above questions are far more damaging to the long term political stability in this country.
This backs up a story I heard from a FB employee recently. That there is a FB office full of people who are so upset with themselves now that they've realized FB's negative influence on politics that they are holding what he terms "weekly self-flagellation meetings" to go over how bad it is. The good news is that they are very motivated to redeem themselves to the world. They just haven't yet figured out effective ways to do so.
Facebook employees desiring to impact elections is the stuff of nightmares, and would have a much more severe impact than any potential inference, if true, had.
I don't think they should worry so much... there are plenty of people who post crazy political things already. Just look at the comments on any article anywhere remotely political.
There really are only two real solutions:
1. Paid political ads should be marked as such.
2. Remove fake accounts / bots.
If these people truly regretted the millions they made through the growth of facebook's monstrosity and the part they played in it, they'd put their time and money where their anonymous quotes are and be working to break it apart.
"how Russia used it during the election to elect Trump"
"while the ads may have only reached a small group of people, Trump won the electoral college by a small number of votes, too."
Russia interfered (and we should definitely do something about that)... but Clinton ran a badly managed campaign, and that's why she lost.
First major party nominee to never step foot in Wisconsin since 1972? Clinton [0]
SEIU says to Clinton campaign that they are moving their staff to Michigan toward the end of the campaign (like they wanted to from the beginning).. Clinton's response: turn the bus around and go back to Iowa[1]
Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.[1]
I mean come on... how can she expect to win Wisconsin when she never even stepped foot in the state?
Yep exactly - an awful candidate with an awful campaign. The lack of campaigning in key states like Wisconsin. The nauseating cult of personality around her. Dismissing the Bernie Sanders voters as "Bernie Bros" (despite the large number of young women who supported him). The tone-deaf "America is already great" slogan which existed in complete ignorance of the poor. Her awkward inability to appear like a human being (google "I'm just chillin' in cedar rapids!" and cringe). Her inability to come out in favour of a $15 minimum wage. The fact that the Clinton family are scandal-ridden even before the emails, and so obviously in the pocket of big business. We could go on all day. In my opinion Trump is far worse, but it seems that many Democrat voters didn't "defect" and vote Republican (GOP votes were pretty steady from '08, '12 and '16) ... they just didn't turn out for Hillary. I don't blame them. What an awful choice to be forced to make - Trump or Hillary.
I'm only talking about her campaign and the decisions that were made.
People will agree and disagree about her vs Sanders, policies, etc. And they have varying opinions of Clinton, and she can't do much to change that because of how long she's been in the public eye. But how she ran her campaign was entirely up to her.
Let's not forget the role "political data science" played, as well. You have an unlikable candidate in Clinton, a campaign strategy based on voting against Trump, voters debating whether to commit against Trump or to cast a protest vote lest Clinton gets a strong mandate...
...and the NYT and other newspapers run front-pages saying "Clinton 85% likely to win". I can't imagine a better recipe for fostering voter apathy and absenteeism.
As a candidate she was more awful; while she had slighty lower unfavorables, they were much firmer.
Yes, she'd be far better actually doing the job, but it was clear to anyone with any knowledge of politics that she was the worst major party candidate, as a candidate, in a very long time.
Hillary rigged the DNC and tried to force herself on the American people, essentially leaving them with very little choice. I blame her for Trump more than anyone else.
There was a lawsuit against the DNC for their actions, unfortunately they were able to get the lawsuit dismissed by successfully arguing that they were within their rights to internally choose their own candidate regardless of their own election systems.
Wisconsin would not have been sufficient. Neither would Wisconsin + Michigan.
Also, her victory was so overdetermined that about five things had to go wrong for her to lose. (Email investigation, flawed campaign, the last-minute Comey letter, probably Bernie making trouble for months after he was statistically eliminated but that's hard to tell, Russia intervention, bad electoral college distribution, probably some others I'm forgetting right now)
It's interesting that you refer to Bernie refusing to clear a path for her as "things going wrong". As if her coronation was expected and the path was supposed to be free of competition.
I think tough primary competition should be the norm, and she should have faced more than one strong challenger.
Does everyone know that HN is big enough that organizations/corporations/governments pay people to come here to influence the discussions? No way we can have a civil discussion here on this topic because of that interference. Using the label "conspiracy theory" is a good example of disrupting a discussion.
It's also just a side effect of the voting system. Once the population gets big enough, people vote based on whether or not they agree with the poster instead of whether or not the post advanced the conversation. Over time, those downvoted stop replying due to a perception that they're part of the out-group, and an echo chamber forms.
To prevent this, this site really needs to work hard to maintain an interesting, thought-provoking culture that welcomes dissenting opinions as long as they're well wrote and not overly emotional.
I agree with what you said, and I agree with what I said. :-)
It's funny how technical discussions are much better here, and anything touching politics is terrible. Kind of reminds me of how you can hear good debates on sports radio, but not politics.
Humans get weird when emotion becomes involved. Technical discussions usually have binary, definite solutions, while political opinions stem from culture and emotion, and usually don't have a definite solution. Then when people get stressed or feel attacked, they retreat into a tribal us-vs-them mentality that amplifies itself on the internet.
Plus I do highly suspect that there is significant astroturfing with political issues as well, but because that line of thinking accomplishes nothing but makes me ignore opposing political opinions(which is bad!) I try to avoid that mode of thinking.
I hear you. Though what I try to do lately is: recognize when a partisan / wedge issue / kind of argument is being used. Then ask myself why.
I think the goal of some people is to intentionally cause feelings of hopelessness, thus reducing civic involvement and rates of voting. You have to fight that!
This is my biggest complaint with this website. There's also the 500 point minimum for down voting power which entrenches the opinions maintained by those currently in power.
The whole narrative about the Russian hacking is so strange. Someone from Russia, government or citizens, bought 100K worth of advertising; meanwhile the candidate spent upwards of 1.3 Billion on their campaign. Yet those 100K were what got one of the most disliked persons in the world elected. It's just silly.
This article reads like it was written before details about the ads were leaked. The "vast majority" of "Russian ads" did not mention the election, voting, or any particular candidate. That effectively means that any ad, purchased by a poorly defined "Russian" individual, that discussed LGBT issues was counted as a hit. If that same standard of "meddling" were applied to all countries in the world, I suspect that $100k of spend from Russian users would be the butt of a joke. And I say Russian "users" because there were "more than 3,000" ads spending a total of "at least $100,000". That's an average of $33 per ad. The ads also supported both sides of the issues mentioned, some were expressing support of groups like Black Lives Matter. I see no justifiable reason, given the present evidence, to frame this as some giant Russian conspiracy.
Something related to that article as well is this one is that I think people for whom these stories confirm their biases (e.g. the Russian conspiracy is true) should try to read only the facts. There are indeed lots of facts within these articles, but they're constantly buried within extremely suggestive and extremely unsupported rhetoric. For instance in Washington Post article, they state that "$100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times." Let's think about that for a minute. In the election both parties spent about $6 billion on advertising and of course most all of it targeting the US. Going on with that figure from the Washingon Post that $6 billion could have resulted in tens of trillions of views. To put that another way, that would be each and every man, woman, and child in America seeing 30,000 ads at the minimum. And that minimum is multiplicative as I assumed "hundreds of millions of views" = exactly 100 million views. That is clearly in no way a reasonable suggestion, yet that's the sort of thinking it takes to support the views implicitly expressed within this article.
"Half the world is cracking up in laughter. The United States doesn’t just interfere in elections. It overthrows governments it doesn’t like, institutes military dictatorships. Simply in the case of Russia alone—it’s the least of it—the U.S. government, under Clinton, intervened quite blatantly and openly, then tried to conceal it, to get their man Yeltsin in, in all sorts of ways. So, this, as I say, it’s considered—it’s turning the United States, again, into a laughingstock in the world." --Noam Chomsky[1].
I general I admire Zuckerberg's work, achievements and philanthropy, but his VR pursuit terrifies me. "One billion people in VR" - his goal for the next few years - is nothing else than what we've seen in Matrix the Movie.
I moved for work last year and now live 7 hours from all the roots I had growing up. Until personal teleportation exists and I can be with my extended family and friends in the evenings and weekends while at work during the week, VR seems like the next closest thing. I get that there’s plenty of cons to VR, especially one controlled by facebook. But the draw here is similar to that of social media to begin with for me anyway, to reconnect with people lost by distance.
Clinton's people swallowed a lot of fake news about Trump, too. Clinton loyalists think that no informed or intelligent person could have possibly not voted for her.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadIt is such a dishonest narrative.
I thought it would be a story about the wider cultural effects of social media and Facebook, but it was more partisan conspiracy theories.
I'm disapointed in Vanity Fair for running this type of piece.
FWIW, I do agree that the wider cultural impact of Facebook is more important than any specific instance of foreign meddling, but that’s not the subject of the article. The article is about the people at Facebook, and if the Russian interference is what they are focusing on, even if they’re wrong, then that is what the article will mention.
There are plenty of stories about the social impact of Facebook if that’s the subject matter you want.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russi...
$100,000 in Facebook ads versus billions in advertising spending from the DNC and RNC? http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/10/hillary-clin...
It is a manufactured conspiracy theory.
Given the resources available to these state actors, isn’t it possible that the easily tracked $100k spend is the tip of an iceberg?
No. That would be a conspiracy theory.
And beyond the miniscule amount in ad spending, you also have to accept that a small number of political ads on Facebook swung the election in the States that Clinton lost.
If there's one constant in the investigations, it is the steady drip of new facts. In fact, it is self-assured reactions like the above that have destroyed a lot of people's credibility on the topic.
That's just speculation. We can only base rational discussion on the information available to us now.
At that rate, even if the Russians ads we're discussing had all been targeted at the Presidential election in those 3 states (far from true), that only equals about 5,000 votes.
Further assuming that 2/3's of votes aren't changeable and the $2.5 billion was spent to influence the remaining third, we're talking about 1500 votes influenced.
And I brought up credibility because one important facet that seems to be serially forgotten is that the major targets of the investigations have already destroyed their credibility, as have many commentators. I would encourage some googling to look at the past claims people make - more often than not you're hearing assertions of tribal fidelity rather than arguments based on factual exploration, and one bit of that information available to us now is a fair amount of background on motivations.
> We can only base rational discussion on the information available to us now.
This is false. We are planning animals. We do what-if projections constantly. In fact, we can't not do it - you did it yourself to make an implicit argument above attempting to make any forward-looking seem silly.
There is a problem right there, if there was state funded/directed interference in US elections then Facebook have every incentive to downplay and hide this.
Off the top of my head I can think of at least two instances where they blatantly miscounted the amount they charged advertisers for paid traffic they never sent, and that's without even getting into zuck's wild claims that fb had zero effect on the 2016 election, and then months later admitting that was completely wrong.
There is very little reason to trust 'facebook releasing numbers' on this issue. They have EVERY reason to obfuscate, stall, and misreport on it - they are complicit in an extremely serious federal crime.
One was rather irrelevant, while the other will result in more distant relations with our Cold War rival, serious witch-hunting, and most importantly: further polarization of the U.S. political climate.
"You lie!" was such a telling moment.
The GOP basically decided that Kenyan-born interloper was illegitimate and thus everything he did was too.
Remember, birtherism was relegated to the fringe (basically just Orly Taitz) until Trump revived it in 2011 and nearly started beating Romney in the polls. Sure enough, the same thing happened when he called Mexicans and illegal immigrants rapists and murderers.
People are fooling themselves if they think a big part of Trumps ascendancy isn’t pure racial animus.
If they wanted to keep decent relations they shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine and shot down an airliner.
It has ranged from:
* Bernie Sanders (second pick for Democrat candidate)
* James Comey (former FBI Director)
* Huma Abedin (deputy chief of staff for Clinton Campaign)
* Russian hackers
* Vladimir Putin (President of Russia)
* Wikileaks (ie: more Russian hackers)
* the Benghazi Committee
* the "Basket of Deplorables" (ie: white America)
* white women (ie: 53% of white women voted for Trump)
* white men (ie: universally reviled by progressive supremacists everywhere)
It seems the Democratic Party will never recover as it is more fragmented than ever, with ailing Nancy Pelosi and out-of-touch NYC urbanite Chuck Schumer being the only notable Democrats as of late. All they can do is respond with righteous indignation rather than form a coherent party platform, especially given extremists of all flavors left-of-center being unable to form anything beyond a rickety coalition under shredded banner of "Democrat."
Self-reflection and soul-searching is totally beyond the left's comprehension.
Clinton was just an awful candidate and the shrieking of the liberal media -- from WaPo to CNN to has-been celebrities -- was (and continues to be) tasteless. Whether Clinton's campaign was ever more than "shame on everybody that won't vote for me, also it's a woman's turn now" is irrelevant because that was the only message that got out there.
I would love to see a candidate campaign on, specifically, "tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect." The Democratic Party has truly abandoned tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect, and returning to it would go a long way to bridging the ever-widening gap between Democrats and Republicans.
That phrase didn't refer to "white America"-- it referred to white supremacists.
The problem was that Clinton rankly speculated that half of Trump's supporters were made up of white supremacists, in a futile effort to divide his base. And later in that same paragraph she said this:
"He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million."
Even if Clinton's statistics were even close to correct, it was a counterproductive statement. Trump voters who were white supremacists were energized by being attacked directly by Clinton. Trump voters who were not white supremacists were energized by the likelihood that Clinton was exaggerating the numbers to spread FUD and misdirect from her own historically low polling numbers as a presidential candidate. And Bernie supporters who were on the fence wondered why Clinton was name-calling Trump supporters when a large part of Bernie's appeal had been the exact opposite kind of behavior-- instead employing care and caution when referring to the grievances of Trump supporters-- as a primary candidate.
But more importantly, presidential candidates don't just improvise new phrases like that in the middle of speeches. Has there been anything written about who authored that phrase for Clinton and why they did it?
Edit: clarification
Actually, it was much broader than "white supremacists". Here's the quote:
They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic — Islamophobic — you name it.
If someone is critical of arbitrary elevation of women above men, are they racist?
If someone is critical of unrestricted immigration, are they xenophobic?
If someone is critical of violent political expression steeped in Islamic ideology, are they Islamophobic?
---
Let me be clear, I am by no means advocating that one particular race is superior over another and I wholeheartedly reject discrimination and prejudice based on race or ethnicity.
Furthermore, I am all for protecting women from sexual violence and ensuring women have the right to vote, right to hold public office, right have equal rights in family law, and so many other rights and freedoms that women (and men!) have fought for.
Additionally, I am all for legal immigration where (for example) high-value applicants are expedited.
And finally, I have absolutely no dislike or fear of Islamic cultures and peoples, nor do I regard Islam as a dangerous political force.
In addition to "tolerance, shared responsibility and mutual respect" it would be awesome to see a candidate with a platform that was fiscally conservative and socially liberal (i.e. the middle) which is what I think most Americans have wanted for decades.
Unfortunately, wedge politics and the two party system has driven the electorate to a game of political ping pong for those same decades in a single file march toward an ever increasing indebted, imperialistic, totalitarian police state
You can be fiscally conservative and socially neutral maybe or socially laissez faire but not socially progressive or socially liberal.
If you want social liberalism, money has to be spent on programs that enable social progress or has to be spent on enforcement of socially liberal laws and regulations, (history has shown it won't happen otherwise). This is the opposite of what we know fiscal conservatism to be in America.
I know this sounds nitpickish, but the closest you can get is to say something like I want liberal policies as cheaply as possible and unfortunately for those who want to claim the middle with that, that's essentially the policy of liberalism and the left. That's what liberals want too...
What socially liberal, fiscally conservative generally means is I don't care what you do but I don't wanna pay for it and that's not the middle, that's libertarian.
Sorry for the rant but I'm generally tired of seeing a claim for the middle being used as a substitute for I want socially liberal policies but I don't want to feel bad about not fully supporting them because I don't wanna give up any money...
This probably isn't you of course, but it sure is a lot of people who claim to be "socially liberal, fiscally conservative"
While libertarian ideology may be akin to some brand of utilitarian nihilism, we don't have to lower ourselves to that level of impersonal cold distance. Government need not be devoid of personality for us to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
We don't need to give way to expensive social welfare programs in order to have a clean conscience.
The primary difference between being socially liberal and socially conservative is the idea of the government’s role in our lives (and more generally, collectivism vs. individualism). The socially liberal concepts of universal health care, social security, welfare, public schools and universities, environmental regulations and others all require funding in the form of taxation and then spending in form of government programs.
This type of taxation and the growth of government spending goes against the basic principles of fiscal conservatism.
Until robot-powered post-scarcity and UI changes the fundamental structure of society and government, social liberalism and fiscal conservatism is a paradox.
According to Wikipedia,
"Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties under the rule of law with an emphasis on economic freedom."
I think universal health care is fundamentally incompatible with both civil liberties and economic freedom.
What some consider progress, like more centralized power from elites that live X,000s miles away, others consider a regression. The biggest problem with monarchies was not their bloodline-based successions or validation by the Pope, it was their highly-centralized power.
NYC urbanite? Hmm that sounds like another politician I know.
> awful candidate
An awful candidate wouldn’t win the PV
> shrieking of the liberal media
You’re aware that the National Review had a cover story dedicated to stopping Trump right? Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, Goerge Will and David Brooks all opposed him through today.
> tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect
That sounds a lot like “Stronger Together”, the slogan of the defeated candidate.
Takes about 10 seconds for any digital marketer to look at the spend and reach and call bs. Unless of course they have some ominous fantasy of this 'only being the tip of the iceberg'
It's a little unsettling to see the media do a terrible job, scream "look over their!", and then try to present themselves as the great defenders of American democracy.
And I've been very disappointed in U.S. mainstream press for repeating these partisan talking points with very little objective analysis. They complain about RT meddling in our election but our own consolidated media has opened the door to all of this IMO.
This is a prettyyyyyy unflattering comparison
Zuckerberg just has a bad case of affluenza, always has.
Many others share GP's view that the whole Russia thing is potentially overblown. Personally, I'm still rather skeptical of the whole matter, considering I haven't been presented with sufficiently strong evidence to make me agree that it played a large role in the 2016 election.
Because this kind of comment usually incites a debate that is below the intellectual standards of HN.
This is not a statement about the comment's merit. Just a few days ago, there was a submission about how the US and Israel are leaving UNESCO. I was initially disappointed to see it being flagged off the front page because I was hoping for some insightful commentary on this development, but 90% of comments was arguing about whether there is a Jewish world conspiracy going on. That's why political stories and comments are very often flagged or downvoted to death.
Can someone please explain why the left's frustration over a Trump presidency is any more justified than the right's was over the Obama presidency. And can they also explain how screaming "RUSSIANS" is better than developing a platform that works for the fly over states and not just the coasts.
Honestly, is couching everything in the Socratic method the blessed way to comment on HN?
Sometimes I don't want to discuss I just want to make a statement.
Even if I agreed with the man's vile philosophy, if I was a supporter I would be frankly embarrassed by the man's performance. He is not even able to staff his branch of government.
The man is a failure by every metric. I am speaking now more to the "frustration" over a Trump presidency that the entire country has, not "the left" as you identify them.
250 years ago, Europe was still ruled by kings.
Basically, contrast the American revolution to the French one.
Anyway, the American right has generally been for preserving liberal democracy, not a monarchy or a cultural identity. Trump is a bit of an exception to this pattern, and doesn't have full support from the Republican party in the aspects of his politics that mirror the European right's (building walls, America first, etc.). The fact that the American congress has problems passing significant legislation demonstrates this fact.
It's not like he proudly boasted about his sexual assaults. Nor has he spoken at conferences for white supremacists. He hasn't even said that Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers (and some, he assumes, are good people). He definitely doesn't have a VP that supports gay conversion camps. And he isn't trying to take healthcare from millions of individuals.
Really, as a white man in the highest tax brackets, I have no reason at all to fear Trump, so why would anyone else?
Because if not, let me rewrite your last sentence: "Really, as a member of the inoculated group, I have no reason to fear the plague, so why would anyone else?"
Ironic. Washington DC has the exact same problem: isolated, life in a bubble, mono-vision, etc.
Blaming FB and only FB is an oversimplification, to say the least, but it's a great spin that protects the elites (from their responsibility for the build up to Nov 2016 and all that has come to light since).
However, I assumed the headline was going to lead to a story about their regrets around PHP, HHVM, Hack, etc.
Assuming it's sarcasm, at least someone seemed to be aware of the issues....
// Holy shit, is this the cleanest fucking frontend file you've ever seen?!
How have filter bubbles changed our political landscape? How has the obsession for "likes" and "shares" incentivized certain speech over others? Has it diminished the variety of opinions? How do we create a platform that encourages people to step outside their comfort zone and learn things they may initially disagree with? How do we get people of differing opinions, who in our current world demonize each other, to sit down and share their stories and listen to? Is it even possible to build a popular platform that fights against our innate biases, like selection bias, confirmation bias, etc.?
Be the alleged Russian involvement as it may, I think that the above questions are far more damaging to the long term political stability in this country.
There really are only two real solutions:
1. Paid political ads should be marked as such. 2. Remove fake accounts / bots.
That still can't prevent paid shills...
"while the ads may have only reached a small group of people, Trump won the electoral college by a small number of votes, too."
Russia interfered (and we should definitely do something about that)... but Clinton ran a badly managed campaign, and that's why she lost.
First major party nominee to never step foot in Wisconsin since 1972? Clinton [0]
SEIU says to Clinton campaign that they are moving their staff to Michigan toward the end of the campaign (like they wanted to from the beginning).. Clinton's response: turn the bus around and go back to Iowa[1]
Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.[1]
I mean come on... how can she expect to win Wisconsin when she never even stepped foot in the state?
0. http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/hil...
1. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-hillary-clint...
People will agree and disagree about her vs Sanders, policies, etc. And they have varying opinions of Clinton, and she can't do much to change that because of how long she's been in the public eye. But how she ran her campaign was entirely up to her.
It wasn't just Clinton's campaign that was awfully run, it was the whole DNC who screwed up by conspiring to make her the candidate.
...and the NYT and other newspapers run front-pages saying "Clinton 85% likely to win". I can't imagine a better recipe for fostering voter apathy and absenteeism.
less awful than the winner, so I doubt this is why she lost.
Yes, she'd be far better actually doing the job, but it was clear to anyone with any knowledge of politics that she was the worst major party candidate, as a candidate, in a very long time.
There was a lawsuit against the DNC for their actions, unfortunately they were able to get the lawsuit dismissed by successfully arguing that they were within their rights to internally choose their own candidate regardless of their own election systems.
http://observer.com/2017/08/court-admits-dnc-and-debbie-wass...
Also, her victory was so overdetermined that about five things had to go wrong for her to lose. (Email investigation, flawed campaign, the last-minute Comey letter, probably Bernie making trouble for months after he was statistically eliminated but that's hard to tell, Russia intervention, bad electoral college distribution, probably some others I'm forgetting right now)
I think tough primary competition should be the norm, and she should have faced more than one strong challenger.
It hurt further because Bernie had an absurd cult of personality that Clinton did not have in 2016
To prevent this, this site really needs to work hard to maintain an interesting, thought-provoking culture that welcomes dissenting opinions as long as they're well wrote and not overly emotional.
It's funny how technical discussions are much better here, and anything touching politics is terrible. Kind of reminds me of how you can hear good debates on sports radio, but not politics.
Plus I do highly suspect that there is significant astroturfing with political issues as well, but because that line of thinking accomplishes nothing but makes me ignore opposing political opinions(which is bad!) I try to avoid that mode of thinking.
I think the goal of some people is to intentionally cause feelings of hopelessness, thus reducing civic involvement and rates of voting. You have to fight that!
"Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News"
https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...
Washington Post discussion of the leaks framing this information, nonetheless, in favor of a Russian conspiracy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-o...
Something related to that article as well is this one is that I think people for whom these stories confirm their biases (e.g. the Russian conspiracy is true) should try to read only the facts. There are indeed lots of facts within these articles, but they're constantly buried within extremely suggestive and extremely unsupported rhetoric. For instance in Washington Post article, they state that "$100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times." Let's think about that for a minute. In the election both parties spent about $6 billion on advertising and of course most all of it targeting the US. Going on with that figure from the Washingon Post that $6 billion could have resulted in tens of trillions of views. To put that another way, that would be each and every man, woman, and child in America seeing 30,000 ads at the minimum. And that minimum is multiplicative as I assumed "hundreds of millions of views" = exactly 100 million views. That is clearly in no way a reasonable suggestion, yet that's the sort of thinking it takes to support the views implicitly expressed within this article.
1. https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/chomsky_half_the_world...
Does anyone want it to happen? Really?