That is a very narrow and lazy reading of a pretty important issue--that the attention economy of social media is easily manipulated. It can go any direction and in any country...as mentioned in the article.
I have been pondering what the reaction by commentors leaving comments like yours would be to this kind of reporting if it had been Bernie or Hillary who had massive coordinated online efforts to influence the election in their favor executed by hostile foreign powers... It's an interesting thought experiment.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
> When putting these media ecosystems to political purposes, various tools are useful. Humour is one. It spreads well; it also differentiates the in-group from the out-group; how you feel about the humour, especially if it is in questionable taste, binds you to one or the other. The best tool, though, is outrage. This is because it feeds on itself; the outrage of others with whom one feels fellowship encourages one’s own. This shared outrage reinforces the fellow feeling; a lack of appropriate outrage marks you out as not belonging. The reverse is also true. Going into the enemy camp and posting or tweeting things that cause them outrage—trolling, in other words—is a great way of getting attention.
It seems like it's so easy to manufacture majority opinions that don't actually exist. And people tend to vote based on how they think their group will vote. Take somewhere like reddit or even here, and look at the disparity between political opinions on ordinary threads in random places, and the top comments/voting patterns on explicitly political ones.
So yeah, I'll sign on to "gaming social media kills the democracy." The question is, what are we going to do about it? As an individual you don't have to participate in social media, sure, but that counts about as much as your vote does.
If it’s so easy to manufacture majority opinions, why didn’t the candidate with the biggest budget win? ($1.4B)
Social media over-amplifies outrage and pushes the most reactive stories to the top of the feed. That’s a big problem, with or without foreign government involvement. At the same time, news controlled through a handful of TV networks wasn’t a good state of affairs either.
It will be interesting to see how the media evolves.
Because parent is a victim of the manufactured opinion that fake news is the main reason Trump won.
There are many other reasons not to vote Clinton but you get systematically harassed if you even mention the huge failures of the previous administration.
Trump won because American democracy is twisted to overvalue rural voters, who have really fucked up and detestable values. Hillary won the actual popular vote, which you already know, if the pathetic approval ratings lately haven't made clear.
Congrats for being on the side of the undereducated, underskilled, and xenophobic.
I'm really disappointed that you've mixed opinion and fact.
The FACT that the vote of some in rural America, by design, is worth more than the vote of someone living in a city (for the race of the US presidency) is literal fact.
Back when the system was designed the difference in representation strength would surely have been far less; cities were far smaller and their density within a state arguably balanced by the likelihood of someone way out in the far flung reaches to actually turn out to vote.
Leave the topic of who ran last time, and also the other topic of what views some voters you might not have even met, have any due time elsewhere... (maybe a different sub-thread in this discussion).
This comment breaks the site guidelines. It's not ok to post flamebait or personal attacks, regardless of how right you are and/or wrong someone else is.
We all know about the growth of online shaming culture and we all need to contribute to avoiding it on this site. If you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and abide by it when commenting here, we'd appreciate it.
I'll accept that this may break site guidelines, and should be dinged. I don't feel too bad about posting it, though. I'm a left-center person calling out pretty standard far right nastiness that is definitely de rigeur for those types. I absolutely reject the idea that saying US rural culture is all sorts of fucked up is in any way a personal attack or flamebait. We accept all sorts of far left attacks against centrism as if they are reasonable, and while I don't agree, I don't complain.
Because parent is a victim of the manufactured opinion that fake news is the main reason Trump won.
Whether Trump won because of fake news or because of Clinton's weaknesses as a candidate, or because of his own agenda, surely it must be interesting to ponder why Russia felt the need to expend so much effort in creating a sophisticated fake news operation to attempt to sway the election. They certainly thought they'd accomplish something by doing so, right?
If it’s so easy to manufacture majority opinions, why didn’t the candidate with the biggest budget win?
For the same reason the side with the most money doesn't always win legal cases. Money is a help, but not a guarantee. Money applied in just the right way, at just the right times, is extremely effective. The better-funded campaign in 2016 did a worse job of manipulating social media, and that certainly had an effect on the outcome.
2 is only the case if you limit media to things 45-50+ year olds consume (ie newspapers). And I don't even mean that there were blogs that disagreed with her: talk radio (I assume) and Fox didn't like her - and it is really not strange that newspapers supported the democratic candidate, especially in such a polarized election.
As for 1), she clearly spent too much on old-media. You don't win the presidential election by setting fire to 4 billion USD, even if you technically "spend" the most.
And now, after HRC lost, we are still using the same mechanism, and lenses, to form conclusions about why she lost.
That’s the definition of insanity.
Would you be able to explain why a foreign government felt the need to expend enormous resources on trolling operations in support of Trump when Hillary was going to lose anyway?
I think it brings about about as much change in democracy as TV did. I mean, gradually people will adjust to that new level of openness of information, 'opinions' on social media will simply mean less to people.
How is it possible to educate people so that they are likely to form their own opinion rather than to put blind trust into the opinion of their peers?
It would be a big win if this debate would move at least some people into a direction of looking at the information that is served to us in a more critical manner
Oh, you mean, forming their own opinion instead of blindly following the opinion of the newspaper editorial boards, and the experts predicting immediate financial collapse?
A skeptic might read several news sources as as to get a more complete picture of what is happening. The problem is that this requires some time and attention to details while reading. What other options are there?
As a start: not spend 12+ years of their lives being told to regurgitate information by their teachers whether it is right or not. Not have them say a pledge every morning without thinking about it.
Teach the kids to question _everything_, feed them information from all sorts of different sources.
Even better, create several different "Overton Groups", where each group has a different overton window. When these groups try to communicate with each other, they find each other's positions to be outrageous and compromise is impossible.
When you use social media to influence elections in a neighbor of a geopolitical rival, don't be surprised when the same geopolitical rival learns how to use social media against you.
As much as I think the Russian interference in the US election was a catastrophe for American democracy, the blame lies at least as much with western intelligence services that continued to poke the Russian bear well after it started showing its teeth, with no real plan for what to do when it started biting.
That 2014 article really doesn’t age well, and it’s ahistorical to claim that there wasn’t and isn’t broad support for a more liberal regime in Ukraine.
Regardless of how decimated the Ukrainian population was while under Russian control, and how effective russification was in creating a divided polity, there is still a substantial part of the country who wants independence from Russian dominance. To believe that this is a just result of western encouragement or interference is to be either narcissistic, pessimistic, or duped.
Didn't read the article, but i believe the threat to democracy is largely because Facebook is a centralized platform. They have an enormous amount of power because they can directly influence the type of information their users consume. They essentially have control of a 1b+ herd....
In regards to social media and fake news, I am thinking more and more about a talk that Professor Peter Kruse gave three years ago about the tendency of such systems for hysteresis effects.
While that's true, I don't think it's the core of it.
As people, we like to be right. So we're drawn towards people who tell us we are right. Social media lets that take over our lives entirely - we can now live happily without ever hearing an opinion we disagree with. My neighbour and I might live one door from each other yet occupy totally different echo chambers.
I think you see this in the way people view Trump, Brexit and the like. No one's preconceptions are challenged any more.
I find that social media has the exact opposite problem. There's enough politically incindiary material on there that reading Facebook or Twitter frequently leaves me angry.
The friends and co-workers I spend time with in person have a much less diverse set of views than the broader group in my Twitter and Facebook feeds. Literally every person I spend real-world time with is wealthy, educated and liberal. Nobody ever says anything truly upsetting.
I actually don't get why facebook doesn't bury political posts in your feed. People are not going to be more "connected" when arguing about politics online.
From an AI point of view it's much simpler to detect if a post is political in nature
I haven’t seen any proof that FB actually has power.
Instead, I’m seeing that they have inflated the number of users and ad impressions. Also, I’m seeing an argument that FB is somehow so powerful, that under $100k of FB ads swung the election (even though the campaigns bought 10s of millions of FB ads too).
I find the focus on $100k in ads frustrating. There is evidence that Russian intelligence also created groups, with hundreds of thousands of members, which pushed shamelessly extreme viewpoints. It seems like this effort in addition to paid commenters and bots would dwarf the effect of the limited amount of advtertising that has been reported.
I don’t know how much you know about Facebook marketing, but organic reach from pages is non existent. Facebook pushed for paid ads a long time ago. You’d be lucky to get just 5% of your followers to even see your free posts, not to mention to engage or act on.
Here we go again, another attack on gaming culture without any actual research into the topic. GamerGate had nothing to do with misogyny - yes here were bad actors in the movement but GameGate started much earlier than Zoë Quinn - it started with the end of Mass Effect 3 when gamers complained the game was an unfinished mess and both the developer and the gaming media called us all entitled neckbeards. Zoe Quinn was just another chapter in this long saga of collusion between media and industry. None of those death/rape threats have been proven or arrests made so anyone who believes this and writes articles on it has an agenda to push further for attention from the other side of GamerGate - the social justice warriors. It’s ridiculously easy to game them too - write outrageous articles about misogyny like this one and they’ll gang up to get the subject of the article fired from his job.
Seems like the current narrative spread by all the mainstream media is "censorship is good for you because... Russia". Ironic, especially considering the commentary in the very same media outlets a couple years back when Russia was trying to censor the Internet.
I think one of the most fundamental problems is the highlighting of things based on likes/dislikes/voting. It inherently drives people to polarization and is a very soft target for gaming. If you look at boards that use old chronologically ordered systems that are not threaded, there tends to be much more diversity of thought. A comment is just a comment - just like real life. People say smart things, people say stupid things. And the same people often do plenty of both. When you read a thread some comments you might love, some you might hate - but instead of focusing on one or the other you get a flow of ideas and views of all sorts. Instead in ordered/threaded systems we obsess over singular comments and the comments themselves become centers of discussion.
One of the first effects is that the only thing that gets visibility when there are 'opposed' groups (in other words groups that do not upvote one another -- this effect is even more exagerrated when we introduce downvotes) is the largest plurality. One view has 51% of the support, the other has 49%. The 49%, even though it represents practically half of all views, would be buried anytime it's mentioned. You'd expect there to be about a 49% chance of any comment you read of being a 49% view. Instead you'll read each and every single 51% comment until you get down to the bottom sorted 49% views. Consequently we see groups begin to splinter off into their own little spaces where they can discuss things separate from the 51%. And just like that you have fermenting radicalism.
An analogy I quite like is to imagine we're trying to solve a math problem. The correct answer to this problem is 0. However, one side believes the answer is absolutely at least 50. And the other side believes the answer must be no more than -50. When these two groups remain within contact, they counter balance each other. But now let's isolate these groups. In the past when the -50 side chose to go -60 there would be some push back against that and it would help create a more of a central equilibrium. But in isolation without opposition, -60 sounds awesome. Why not -70, or even lower? And on the other side an equal but opposite push for 60, 70 and more is simultaneously happening.
The more segregated we are, the more out of touch with reality we become.
> If you look at boards that use old chronologically ordered systems that are not threaded, there tends to be much more diversity of thought. A comment is just a comment - just like real life. People say smart things, people say stupid things. And the same people often do plenty of both. When you read a thread some comments you might love, some you might hate - but instead of focusing on one or the other you get a flow of ideas and views of all sorts. Instead in ordered/threaded systems we obsess over singular comments and the comments themselves become centers of discussion.
My experience is like this: flat, chronological comment systems have more "diversity of thought", because they make it harder for people to actually engage with each other - so you get more shallow comments. Tree commenting encourages depth of discussion.
Interfaces are a problem, too. You can't have a meaningful discussion under a popular post on Facebook, because UX discourages it. You can't easily browse through hundreds of comments - you need to click a lot to show more comments, and each such click degrades performance of the site itself. On top of that, misclick somewhere, and your state is gone.
Upvotes are a solvable problem. In fact, both HN and Reddit solved it, by not doing strict score sorting. Also, with proper UX, you can skim all comments quickly.
Ultimately, the problem with on-line discussion is the same as with lots of real-world issues - there is just too many people, and each one has an opinion.
View a discussion as solving a math problem. No, that's not entirely accurate but I do think the parallels are solid. Would you prefer threaded or chronologically linear? Why? The answer is almost unarguably the chronologically linear. Flat chronological systems don't really make it difficult for people to engage. People certainly can and do quote one another. And I think they also tend to progress the discussion much more rapidly than threaded systems for at least a couple of big reasons:
Threaded systems result in people repeating themselves constantly. For instance this topic currently has 16 top level threads and a total of 86 comments. However, I'd estimate 80% of the comments are saying the exact same thing in a variety of different ways:
- 'Trump won because media manipulation.'
- 'Hillary more actively manipulated the media and did not win, therefore the above is false.'
The 'personalization' of threaded systems leaves most participants oblivious to most of everything else that's being said -- even when said at roughly the same time. So instead of the direction moving forward it takes a sort of logarithmic divide with numerous divides repeating other divides. This is a very common theme in every topic.
Another major issue here is that as time elapses the number of people seeing any given comment rapidly approaches 0. Chronologically ordered systems enable lengthier discussion. Threaded systems all but ensure any discussion is dead after < 24 hours and often much sooner. So you have a sort of double whammy of not only a divide of progression, but less time spent 'progressing' as well.
And lastly, I think chronological systems also deter pointless nitpicks. For instance I really want to get snarky about thinking Reddit's voting system has solved anything, but what's the point? The only reason I'd discuss this is because of this personalization, but it's unlikely to end with either of us feeling any more well informed and it certainly has extremely little to do with the topic at hand.
> View a discussion as solving a math problem. No, that's not entirely accurate but I do think the parallels are solid. Would you prefer threaded or chronologically linear? Why? The answer is almost unarguably the chronologically linear.
No, I would prefer threaded, of course. That's because it is natural way I, and I would imagine most people, think - by breaking down problems into parts, recursively, and solving them in isolation. Note that, whenever you write stuff like:
1.
1.1.
1.2.
2.
2.1.
2.1.a.
2.1.b.
2.2.
3.
3.1.
you're creating a threaded model, albeit with limitations of a static medium.
> However, I'd estimate 80% of the comments are saying the exact same thing in a variety of different ways
You'd be wrong :).
> Another major issue here is that as time elapses the number of people seeing any given comment rapidly approaches 0. Chronologically ordered systems enable lengthier discussion. Threaded systems all but ensure any discussion is dead after < 24 hours and often much sooner.
I disagree. My experience with boards using chronological ordering is even better at ensuring "the number of people seeing any given comment rapidly approaches 0". When you have 200 comments in a chronological system, most people aren't going to bother reading anything but the last few. In threaded systems like HN, it's much easier to handle, because you can skim the structure and zoom in on the subdiscussion that interests you.
As for discussion being dead after < 24 hours, that's most likely caused by HN stories being short-lived on the frontpage, and people being reluctant to engage once the story falls off it.
> And lastly, I think chronological systems also deter pointless nitpicks.
What you call pointless nitpicks I call interesting tangents, which are often much more valuable that the original, primary topic, and they can grow on the side pretty much thanks to threading.
> The only reason I'd discuss this is because of this personalization
I don't understand what you mean by "personalization" and why you keep bringing it up. There is nothing personalized on HN itself, sans the top bard color (and showing dead posts).
Personalization is what happens in threaded systems. In threaded systems the number of viewers and participants in any given thread extremely rapidly approaches 2, then 1, then 0. Your analog of how problems are solved has nothing to do with the reality of how threaded systems work. In reality it would be:
It's the key problem. When people isolate themselves from everybody else, there's no real progression in the discussion. On HN I can't even find new posts if I wanted to! When I last posted, 15 hours ago, I mentioned there were 86 posts made. That did not include mine. There are now a total of 89. So including yours that means one solitary other individual has since posted in this thread. I wished to locate his post to see where he fit in our little discussion, but alas that's not really practical in this model of discussion.
The reason posts die rapidly is because there is no notion of chronology. When you look at a post from 3 days ago you're mostly just going to find comments from 3 days ago. Now go to literally any reasonable size chronologically ordered forum and you'll find interesting topics that in many cases have been actively going for years, and it's phenomenally interesting to be able to clearly see and follow the changing views, discoveries, and so on over time.
Like you're inadvertently alluding to, I think this format is more popular in large part because it's a minimal effort, rapid response game. It's certainly fun and addicting, but I think it has a very negative effect on the overall level of content.
When George W Bush won the election it was all the fault of Fox News and right wing radio.
Now that HRC lost the fault now lies allegedly with social media and evil foreigners.
It's like people blaming comic books, TV, rock music and video games for what they see as the failings of youth.
Acknowledging that the Democrats chose poor candidates in Gore and Clinton and that winning three Presidential terms in a row is hard is apparently harder than blaming people for voting the 'wrong' way on some new media development.
Clinton spent 1.2Bn and had loads of young people working on media. They probably weren't just telling truths about Trump. But apparently a few hackers around the place were vastly better than them.
Clinton is so unlikable by the masses that we got Trump.
The DNC ignored the upswell behind Bernie (who I would voted for instead of an independent) and chose her as their candidate. Even Elizabeth Warren agreed the DNC failed us miserably and again because of that we have Trump.
I get that you don't seem to like Democrats - that's fine, I don't much care for them myself (although Republicans probably even less). However, the problem we are facing today is different than just spin. People are fundamentally trying to alter the public's perception of truth, not just spin or political opinion, and they have found that they can do this by saying a lie loud enough and often enough.
And in case you think this is just opinion/spin itself, check this out:
There are foreign powers coughRUSSIAcough actively trying to disrupt/damage/destroy our democratic institutions. Considering the ongoing investigations by Mueller we still do not know if POTUS is a puppet, through threat of blackmail or evidence of dirty laundry, to Russian agents.
It's funny that we can't just meet at the obvious middle ground.
Russia didn't win the election for Trump, but you are kidding yourself if you believe it didn't play a factor. US democracy has a lot of work to do, but Putin is an ex-KGB strongman who assassinates his opponents and annexes neighbors. It's pretty obvious how he operates.
You are most certainly right about Putin, but that's not the point. You can't just blame censorship and failing policies on a foreign country. What I find truly intriguing is this lack of self criticism on the part of many people in the US. And about annexing neighbours, let's not talk about Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Sudan, Somalia and all the shady things that happened in Central/South America in the 60's.
Not interested in playing "who is the worst". If you want me to acknowledge the US has done and continues to do evil stuff, well, yeah. My only point is that Russia intervened in a flawed American democracy. That's obvious, the only way to have proper self criticism is to acknowledge that reality which doesn't care about your political views.
tu quoque or whataboutism isn't much of an argument.
such responses are often vacuous, if not intellectually dishonest. it's can seem like an effort to divert or sidetrack an argument or conversation with blatantly fallacious responses.
We do have a "trash heap"[1] of blatant lies about the Russia hacking from the "Unelected Deep State" (CIA/NSA/FBI), which just adds to lies from them that have been stacking up for decades. I don't trust agencies with histories of trying to murder civil rights activists like MLK, lying to get us to go to war in Iraq, lying about domestic surveillance, etc.
Then we have the DNC very literally and provably rigging the primaries in favor of Clinton.
You know what? I hate Trump. But give me a break. This Russia trash is just all a distraction. Trump blatantly supports unconstitutional programs like domestic surveillance and gitmo--this should be enough to impeach him alone for supporting an undermining of the US constitution and American's rights.
The fact that they need to rely on this Russia story which requires a number of shifting standards and "just trust us's", rather than in-the-open undemocratic authoritarianism here in the US, is probably a testament to failures of the human mind's ability to think in terms of, and stand up for, liberty.
I have been to Germany and Japan and the people are unbeleivably friendly and wonderful. What on earth is wrong with people that they can be coaxed into the evil dreams of tyrants--conflicts, authoritarianism--and is it happening again? Are we so different or special that we really think tyranny cant happen to us when we are going through the same patterns of history?
Probably, if we could just adjust the human factor of 'susceptability to sell their liberties and fall in line behind authority figures for short-sighted self-interest,' we would live in a much better world.
You've cited a lot of recently proved stuff (DNC rigging) but are ignoring the other stuff (re Russia) propaganda. It seems very arbitrary. Did both not very clearly happen? I don't think there's very many credible sources which believe otherwise.
Probably if we could just adjust human susceptability to sell their liberties and fall in line behind authority figures we would live in a much better world.
That only happens if you are realistic about what's going on instead of holding ideological political views. That's your solution.
I just cited a source that debunked some of the Russia claims, which were said to be "added to the trash heap." Why are you ignoring this?
There are lots of good reasons to oppose and impech Trump. Something is wrong if you can ignore the authoritarianism, corruption, and unconstitutionality that exists here in the US--that both parties support, which is why they won't use them as reasons to impeach Trump--and you have been coaxed into a need to make a reach for a dubious conflict-stirring story of half-truths and shifting standards.
You should ask yourself who the parties are that win after every election, no matter Republican or Democrat, and what they stand to gain or lose. Why you, instead, follow the machinations and war cry of authoritarians that have lost all credibility is probably a testament to the human bias to follow authority figures.
You cited a source which debunked the Russian hacking claims, but there's been a lot of evidence of Russian media influence (which is an obviously exploitable weakness).
This didn't have anything to do with Trump. You're reading a lot into what I'm saying.
It has everything to do with Trump and the country. It is an attempted distraction, but the type of thing that happens around the world every year.
Sometimes macroeconomists model concepts in the framework of households. Here is an analogy to help express where I am coming from: let's say every month your homeowners association has an election. For as long as anyone can ever remember, George and Barry win every time. Over the years they have installed security cameras inside your house, created conflicts with neighboring towns which profit their businesses and kill some of our children, and they have not done a very good job of taking care of the neighborhood.
Along comes Don. There are lots of good reasons to hate Don, but George and Barry start a campaign to get him out which involves Ted, an adversary from an entirely different, trashy neighborhood, who passed fliers around with fake information in hopes that Barry wouldnt be elected again.
I'm sitting in HOA meeting wondering why no one has brought up the security cameras inside my house, the fact that my best friend died due to George and Barry, JP & Morgan--who don't even live here--are getting a lot of our money for some reason, Barry's team is rigging the election process, and our neighborhood's health and environment is deteriorating. This was just a small start to a long list of terrible problems.
But George and Barry are running the meeting and Ted is the focus.
Trump blatantly supports unconstitutional programs like domestic surveillance and gitmo--this should be enough to impeach him alone for supporting an undermining of the US constitution and American's rights.
See, statements like this are a part of the problem. Obama did these things too and noone cared. Given that why should anyone believe anything anyone says? And into that vacuum, a new kind of influence emerges, one that is not about policies but just about "my team winning".
Russia is not the whole cause, but it was a catalyst. Most importantly the issue is not the effectiveness or outcome of the covert interference, but that interference is wrong.
Most importantly, aiding and abetting covert influence should be a punishable crime. Current tech environment, where tech gaints simply saying they hadn't noticed is not an acceptable answer.
When you are a tech gaint, with power to influence so many people at once, you have the responsibility to be transparent.
With great power comes great responsibility. Not faux remorse after the fact.
I don’t think anyone is specifically blaming Russia. If they are that’s a pretty naive thing to do.
When I personally talk about Russia, I just point out that this happened. This being the rise of fake news, etc.
We should remember it was the United States and her allies that normalized this behavior. We should take a few lessons from this, when we do something unethical or questionable these tactics are going to be normalized and other countries are going to use them.
Another example is Trump ordering an attack on a sovereign nation without that nation asking or any resolution passing in US Congress or the UNSC.
We need to understand that this is the age we live in, and that we need to work around fixing these issues. Not blaming others or trying to reverse technological processes.
The word "hypornormalization" was created by a soviet thinker to describe the soviet world in the 1980s:
Nobody really believed in Communism anymore and everyone could tell everything is getting worse. The party leaders, factory managers, and government bureaucrats were all thieves who were telling ever more preposterous lies to the people about the state of the economy and the society. Nobody believed the lies, but they also couldn't perceive any alternative arrangement of affairs so they didn't know how to do anything except proceed as if they did believe the lies.
He then traces the rise of perception management, the rise of the banks and neoliberalism, and machinations in the middle east, along with the career of Donald Trump, and threads them all together as Curtis tends to do, to make the case that we are currently in a period of hypernormalization in the west.
What's interesting is that he makes the case that Trump is the perfect man for this time and place, being a phony made-for-TV businessman whose entire career is the triumph of perception over reality, and the movie was made in 2016: Trump wasn't even president yet.
As with all Curtis' stuff I only believe maybe 90% of it. The stuff on the middle east is the weakest. He's guilty of doing the same thing he accuses our political class of doing: oversimplifying things to the extent that he risks fictionalizing them. But it's an extremely interesting look at the current state of the western world.
Oh yeah and Russia features heavily in it, not just in the cautionary tale of the USSR, but at the same time Curtis is emphatic in emphasizing that the post-truth world wasn't conjured up in some Kremlin propaganda office. We've been working on building a post-truth world for ourselves for the past several decades.
> Nobody really believed in Communism anymore and everyone could tell everything is getting worse. The party leaders, factory managers, and government bureaucrats were all thieves who were telling ever more preposterous lies to the people about the state of the economy and the society. Nobody believed the lies, but they also couldn't perceive any alternative arrangement of affairs so they didn't know how to do anything except proceed as if they did believe the lies.
Wow, that pretty much describes exactly what happened in this[1] article in which coastal "third way" centrist consultants to the Democratic party interview midwesterners to figure out why they voted for Trump instead of Clinton and completely omit almost everything they are told in their final report which they carefully craft to reaffirm their preconceived worldview.
No you don't get it. I am not American, but if I was, I would prefer Democrats, at least program-wise. And yet, I share the OP's opinion.
Here's the thing - before social media (which are much more open to public than traditional ones), the general intellectual idea was that more openness in democracy, despite its apparent weaknesses, actually makes the whole thing strong. So for example, military budgets were much more open in the U.S. than in the USSR; this openness could be considered a flaw from the strictly military POV, however, it actually makes everything more efficient because it doesn't let people in power cover more corruption. And so on, you could find many other examples.
However, recently (in the past 20 years), the liberals (in the U.S., you don't have mainstream left, so please don't call them that) have rejected the idea that openness makes the society stronger. And the outcry about social media is just a manifestation of that belief.
Now, the action depends on this belief. If you believe that openness is bad for society, you will favor the censorship of social media, and, taken to the logical conclusion, a very controlled society like Russia or China.
However, if you don't believe that openness is bad, then the proper reaction to existence of social media is to have more openness from the side of the government (and also perhaps industry). In other words, maybe people (on social media) are anxious for information (and so they fill the void with speculation), but the government is still keeping too much for themselves, much more than the social media would allow to be shared. But it will take some time to catch up, because of course existing bureaucrats are used to have their ways.
Just an example. If the U.S. government agencies truly believes that Russian manipulated the election, why don't they just share all the evidence openly, as soon as possible? Why don't they call specific sock-puppets out as being known to be Russian hackers? The reason why not is because institutionally, they are still living in the old paradigm, where secret service operations couldn't be in much public light, because historically, there was no good platform to disseminate this information (citizens couldn't easily use or cross-check it but it was valuable for the foreign actors). Of course, there might be more cynical reasons why is it that way.. but hopefully you get the point.
But blaming new media for the losses is a huge, disingenuous cop out.
Looking next time, at how tough a third term is to get might work better. Making sure that the candidate has few ties to the previous, or both previous administrations from the same party might help more.
Tyler Cowen has a good article about it on Bloomberg:
You are underestimating things. Comic books were scapegoats but like none of your examples really have an explanation on how they do damage. Like one that isn't based on misconceptions. With social media, the pathway is a lot more obvious.
> But apparently a few hackers around the place were vastly better than them.
Yes, yes, this is entirely possible. Do you know how? People working during the campaign still do things very much by hand in ways they don't scale. They walk around canvasing etc. A hacker spins up 20 new AWS instances and have a semi-direct access to your brain.
> Clinton spent 1.2Bn and had loads of young people working on media.
clinton was also under fbi investigation, had wikileaks slow-dripping internal documents, and had a divided party (which clintonites didn't seem all that concerned about at the time).
> Clinton spent 1.2Bn and had load of young people working on media.
And she just flat out cheated, in a way that was so easily discerned (even before this week's statements from Donna Brazille) that it almost definitely cost her tons of votes. As an individual she is by far the most responsible for Trump, especially considering that her campaign even sought to prop up Trump early in the race! And worst of all, she opted out of a landslide win by picking Tim Kaine instead of Sanders as VP.
I have no particular problem with investigating connections between Trump and Russia, but even if the worst of the allegations are true they 1) are about on par with Clinton's behavior in the election and 2) would barely make my top 20 list of appalling revelations regarding American politics. Americans need to step back and get some perspective -- as if the US doesn't do exactly the same or worse in almost every other country on earth.
If you are correct, then it's interesting that so much effort is/was put into organized trolling by hostile state actors, if it has no pay-off. Why would that be?
Obama was lauded for using "Big Data" and "Data Science" to rally voters. It's not hard to guess where his team got the data from.
Now the same thing worked against, for better or worse, people are going out of the way to chastise social media.
Where was this concern when the same companies try and collect as much information as they can - user preferences, tastes, political bends - all in the name of "enhancing" experience. There were tons of articles written on praising the same companies on how clever they actually were.
Lastly, it is funny that economist etc are acting holier than thou when they themselves would be collecting some form of data from their readers to enhance ad revenues etc.
IMHO, its not social media rather letting the collection of personal information get out of hand which is at fault.
Is this butthurt never going to end? Trump won, HRC lost. The reason? Maybe people do not want to elect a person under FBI investigation. Maybe people do not want to elect a person who does not know the meaning of "confidential". Maybe people felt like their voice was not being heard by politicians and media, and Trump would listen as an outsider.
Ah, who am I kidding. Let's blame Zuckerberg and the Russians!
They are under investigation now. I'm talking about the reasons people voted for Trump. At that time HRC was the only candidate under federal investigation.
> You're already too far gone if this is how you think.
Please continue disregarding people who have a different viewpoint than yourself. It has worked very well for me.
That's not "stirring the pot", that's breaking the site guidelines, which ask HN users not to post insinuations of astroturfing or shillage without evidence.
Anyone who wants to pin this on social media hasn't been paying attention to the history of the past 25 years. They've ignored the downfall of the newspaper business which used to take on the role of educating the American public. They've ignored the trend towards 24/7 TV "news" stations that focus more on inciting panic and fear than they do on educating the public. They've ignored the rollback of regulations that have allowed media conglomerates to homogenize what people are exposed to.
The reality is that if there were still journalists doing investigative journalism on par with Woodward and Bernstein and if Americans were getting their news from someone with the gravitas and ethical backbone of Edward R Murrow or Walter Cronkite, these "fake news" stories would be laughed at. But because our schools fail to teach critical thinking and our news either fails to inform people or cannot even interest people enough to watch, social media is the only way we have left for people to consume content and become educated. But since it's an open channel that anyone can participate in, is it any wonder that people would seek to co-opt it for their own purposes? It's little more than a modern day soap box and people have been bloviating their self-serving narratives that way for generations. What's changed isn't social media, it's the lack of adults with professional ethics supplying a baseline reality from which opinions must derive.
This is our generation's "yellow journalism" and it's a reminder of what happens when there's no one who takes on and is recognized for playing the role of establishing that baseline of accepted fact. Social media's reach is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
> They've ignored the downfall of the newspaper business which used to take on the role of educating the American public.
Which American news paper can you point out that's unbiased and isn't pushing some narrative. The truth is that printed press has been the megaphone of the ruling class since the beginning.
I think you’re dead on. When you don’t have a functioning shepherd of public discourse, the various outlets and commentators, and by extension the lies they tell, start to become indistinguishable. I actually understand why many people have a hard time seeing the difference between CNN and Fox News. One embodies a set of ideas I find more tolerable and decent, but they both rely on glitzy dramatizations and questionable punditry to sell a mostly cheap, trashy product. I’m not sure how to make good, rational journalism both economically viable and socially popular, but it definitely seems like now
more than ever there’s a need for it.
There's many things I see wrong with this argument/sentiment in general and I don't really know how to even address most of it.
Apart from what are mostly just biased judgements used to drive forward the narrative, there are 2 basic misconceptions that the article is trying to pedal as fact.
1: That democracy is supposed to inherently solve these issues; there's a clear reason why America was not founded as a democratic country. The founders of the US saw democracy in the same way they viewed autocracy. They called for a careful balance of different political systems in order to minimize the harm of each of these. Democracy was specifically avoided because pure democracy quickly devolves (and is synonymous) to "mobocracy." The article tries to place the blame for this on everything other than the system itself. However, the reason why these issues exist even in a system that is partially democratic (and obviously much more democratic than it was when the United States (or any other country mentioned) was founded) is because they have not taken over. Mob rule is slow to come to power, and this should be a warning to people that we're nearing the edge of the cliff (rather than that some have cheated the system into submission). It's also worth noting that democracy should never imply a system in which everyone independently forms views, as that is quite clearly impossible. Leading to the second point:
2: "Outside influences" are supposedly ruining political discourse. This idea just makes no sense to me. The blame placed on Russia for influencing the 2016 election is effectively for generating discussion. It is not for changing votes, because as far as we know that was never done. It's also not for lying to people; to argue that Russia was in the wrong for lying to people is 100% disingenuous because the authors of this article are just as happy lying to people in order to drive forth their own narrative. It seemingly blames the increased political division on right-wing politics by arguing how everything from Gamergate to Wikipedia has caused people to become more right-leaning. Ignoring the fact that they mischaracterize the entire movement of Gamergate (equating it to alt-right politics by linking it to 4chan, when in fact Gamergate was almost exclusively originating from 8chan, saying that it is trolling rather than a legitimate opinion to hold, etc.) and lie about Wikipedia's political agenda (it's quite easy to see that the major editors on Wikipedia are heavily left-leaning based on the frequent bans given to right-leaning editors), it's immediately clear from the graph showing party division that Democrats have "radicalized" far more than their Republican counterparts. In this scenario, they are using blatant lies and scare tactics to get across their opinion. How is this different at all from what they blame Russia/right-wing media/4chan for? Sure Russia might be using fake accounts to manipulate the public, but if the only solutions you can propose are limiting freedom of speech, you are doing much more to ruin democracy.
Social media is not the root cause. It's merely one of many tools to achieve the main goal which is society's root problem:
The root problem is this: America has slipped for a long time now. It has at its core been corrupted systemically by a destructive value system. Its culture is now based on the idea that to dominate those around oneself is the right thing to do (on a personal, social, national, international and worldwide level).
And those who feel the need to play this game will dominate. They will reinforce and perpetuate this vicious circle - until society collapses. So you might want start counteracting now.
100 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadI have been pondering what the reaction by commentors leaving comments like yours would be to this kind of reporting if it had been Bernie or Hillary who had massive coordinated online efforts to influence the election in their favor executed by hostile foreign powers... It's an interesting thought experiment.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gIiqmat...
Also note from the HN FAQ:
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
This reminds me of this CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
So yeah, I'll sign on to "gaming social media kills the democracy." The question is, what are we going to do about it? As an individual you don't have to participate in social media, sure, but that counts about as much as your vote does.
Social media over-amplifies outrage and pushes the most reactive stories to the top of the feed. That’s a big problem, with or without foreign government involvement. At the same time, news controlled through a handful of TV networks wasn’t a good state of affairs either.
It will be interesting to see how the media evolves.
There are many other reasons not to vote Clinton but you get systematically harassed if you even mention the huge failures of the previous administration.
So there is a little bit of hidden irony there.
Congrats for being on the side of the undereducated, underskilled, and xenophobic.
The FACT that the vote of some in rural America, by design, is worth more than the vote of someone living in a city (for the race of the US presidency) is literal fact.
Back when the system was designed the difference in representation strength would surely have been far less; cities were far smaller and their density within a state arguably balanced by the likelihood of someone way out in the far flung reaches to actually turn out to vote.
Leave the topic of who ran last time, and also the other topic of what views some voters you might not have even met, have any due time elsewhere... (maybe a different sub-thread in this discussion).
We all know about the growth of online shaming culture and we all need to contribute to avoiding it on this site. If you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and abide by it when commenting here, we'd appreciate it.
Whether Trump won because of fake news or because of Clinton's weaknesses as a candidate, or because of his own agenda, surely it must be interesting to ponder why Russia felt the need to expend so much effort in creating a sophisticated fake news operation to attempt to sway the election. They certainly thought they'd accomplish something by doing so, right?
For the same reason the side with the most money doesn't always win legal cases. Money is a help, but not a guarantee. Money applied in just the right way, at just the right times, is extremely effective. The better-funded campaign in 2016 did a worse job of manipulating social media, and that certainly had an effect on the outcome.
In fact, we are seeing:
1. HRC spent more
2. HRC had total support from media (every major newspaper)
3. HRC even had social media employees manipulating their algos and data to her advantage
And now, after HRC lost, we are still using the same mechanism, and lenses, to form conclusions about why she lost.
That’s the definition of insanity.
As for 1), she clearly spent too much on old-media. You don't win the presidential election by setting fire to 4 billion USD, even if you technically "spend" the most.
That’s the definition of insanity.
Would you be able to explain why a foreign government felt the need to expend enormous resources on trolling operations in support of Trump when Hillary was going to lose anyway?
This is definitely true.
If those autocompletes weren't biased then I must be blind.
She did win the popular vote. It is only because of the electoral college that the loser of the popular vote sits in the White House.
It would be a big win if this debate would move at least some people into a direction of looking at the information that is served to us in a more critical manner
Teach the kids to question _everything_, feed them information from all sorts of different sources.
When you use social media to influence elections in a neighbor of a geopolitical rival, don't be surprised when the same geopolitical rival learns how to use social media against you.
Vladimir Putin accuses Hillary Clinton of encouraging Russian protests
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/08/vladimir-putin...
Regardless of how decimated the Ukrainian population was while under Russian control, and how effective russification was in creating a divided polity, there is still a substantial part of the country who wants independence from Russian dominance. To believe that this is a just result of western encouragement or interference is to be either narcissistic, pessimistic, or duped.
If you understand German you can watch it here (6 min). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSEEDB7ViyQ
("Und bist Du nicht willig, so brauch ich ....Geduld".. :-)
As people, we like to be right. So we're drawn towards people who tell us we are right. Social media lets that take over our lives entirely - we can now live happily without ever hearing an opinion we disagree with. My neighbour and I might live one door from each other yet occupy totally different echo chambers.
I think you see this in the way people view Trump, Brexit and the like. No one's preconceptions are challenged any more.
The friends and co-workers I spend time with in person have a much less diverse set of views than the broader group in my Twitter and Facebook feeds. Literally every person I spend real-world time with is wealthy, educated and liberal. Nobody ever says anything truly upsetting.
From an AI point of view it's much simpler to detect if a post is political in nature
Instead, I’m seeing that they have inflated the number of users and ad impressions. Also, I’m seeing an argument that FB is somehow so powerful, that under $100k of FB ads swung the election (even though the campaigns bought 10s of millions of FB ads too).
One of the first effects is that the only thing that gets visibility when there are 'opposed' groups (in other words groups that do not upvote one another -- this effect is even more exagerrated when we introduce downvotes) is the largest plurality. One view has 51% of the support, the other has 49%. The 49%, even though it represents practically half of all views, would be buried anytime it's mentioned. You'd expect there to be about a 49% chance of any comment you read of being a 49% view. Instead you'll read each and every single 51% comment until you get down to the bottom sorted 49% views. Consequently we see groups begin to splinter off into their own little spaces where they can discuss things separate from the 51%. And just like that you have fermenting radicalism.
An analogy I quite like is to imagine we're trying to solve a math problem. The correct answer to this problem is 0. However, one side believes the answer is absolutely at least 50. And the other side believes the answer must be no more than -50. When these two groups remain within contact, they counter balance each other. But now let's isolate these groups. In the past when the -50 side chose to go -60 there would be some push back against that and it would help create a more of a central equilibrium. But in isolation without opposition, -60 sounds awesome. Why not -70, or even lower? And on the other side an equal but opposite push for 60, 70 and more is simultaneously happening.
The more segregated we are, the more out of touch with reality we become.
My experience is like this: flat, chronological comment systems have more "diversity of thought", because they make it harder for people to actually engage with each other - so you get more shallow comments. Tree commenting encourages depth of discussion.
Interfaces are a problem, too. You can't have a meaningful discussion under a popular post on Facebook, because UX discourages it. You can't easily browse through hundreds of comments - you need to click a lot to show more comments, and each such click degrades performance of the site itself. On top of that, misclick somewhere, and your state is gone.
Upvotes are a solvable problem. In fact, both HN and Reddit solved it, by not doing strict score sorting. Also, with proper UX, you can skim all comments quickly.
Ultimately, the problem with on-line discussion is the same as with lots of real-world issues - there is just too many people, and each one has an opinion.
Threaded systems result in people repeating themselves constantly. For instance this topic currently has 16 top level threads and a total of 86 comments. However, I'd estimate 80% of the comments are saying the exact same thing in a variety of different ways:
- 'Trump won because media manipulation.'
- 'Hillary more actively manipulated the media and did not win, therefore the above is false.'
The 'personalization' of threaded systems leaves most participants oblivious to most of everything else that's being said -- even when said at roughly the same time. So instead of the direction moving forward it takes a sort of logarithmic divide with numerous divides repeating other divides. This is a very common theme in every topic.
Another major issue here is that as time elapses the number of people seeing any given comment rapidly approaches 0. Chronologically ordered systems enable lengthier discussion. Threaded systems all but ensure any discussion is dead after < 24 hours and often much sooner. So you have a sort of double whammy of not only a divide of progression, but less time spent 'progressing' as well.
And lastly, I think chronological systems also deter pointless nitpicks. For instance I really want to get snarky about thinking Reddit's voting system has solved anything, but what's the point? The only reason I'd discuss this is because of this personalization, but it's unlikely to end with either of us feeling any more well informed and it certainly has extremely little to do with the topic at hand.
No, I would prefer threaded, of course. That's because it is natural way I, and I would imagine most people, think - by breaking down problems into parts, recursively, and solving them in isolation. Note that, whenever you write stuff like:
you're creating a threaded model, albeit with limitations of a static medium.> However, I'd estimate 80% of the comments are saying the exact same thing in a variety of different ways
You'd be wrong :).
> Another major issue here is that as time elapses the number of people seeing any given comment rapidly approaches 0. Chronologically ordered systems enable lengthier discussion. Threaded systems all but ensure any discussion is dead after < 24 hours and often much sooner.
I disagree. My experience with boards using chronological ordering is even better at ensuring "the number of people seeing any given comment rapidly approaches 0". When you have 200 comments in a chronological system, most people aren't going to bother reading anything but the last few. In threaded systems like HN, it's much easier to handle, because you can skim the structure and zoom in on the subdiscussion that interests you.
As for discussion being dead after < 24 hours, that's most likely caused by HN stories being short-lived on the frontpage, and people being reluctant to engage once the story falls off it.
> And lastly, I think chronological systems also deter pointless nitpicks.
What you call pointless nitpicks I call interesting tangents, which are often much more valuable that the original, primary topic, and they can grow on the side pretty much thanks to threading.
> The only reason I'd discuss this is because of this personalization
I don't understand what you mean by "personalization" and why you keep bringing it up. There is nothing personalized on HN itself, sans the top bard color (and showing dead posts).
The reason posts die rapidly is because there is no notion of chronology. When you look at a post from 3 days ago you're mostly just going to find comments from 3 days ago. Now go to literally any reasonable size chronologically ordered forum and you'll find interesting topics that in many cases have been actively going for years, and it's phenomenally interesting to be able to clearly see and follow the changing views, discoveries, and so on over time.
Like you're inadvertently alluding to, I think this format is more popular in large part because it's a minimal effort, rapid response game. It's certainly fun and addicting, but I think it has a very negative effect on the overall level of content.
Suppose that the center opinion on Y was correct.
Then there would be no need for 'search'. Leftist and Rightist would not exist. Liberals in the center would always be the winners.
It's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
Now that HRC lost the fault now lies allegedly with social media and evil foreigners.
It's like people blaming comic books, TV, rock music and video games for what they see as the failings of youth.
Acknowledging that the Democrats chose poor candidates in Gore and Clinton and that winning three Presidential terms in a row is hard is apparently harder than blaming people for voting the 'wrong' way on some new media development.
Clinton spent 1.2Bn and had loads of young people working on media. They probably weren't just telling truths about Trump. But apparently a few hackers around the place were vastly better than them.
The DNC ignored the upswell behind Bernie (who I would voted for instead of an independent) and chose her as their candidate. Even Elizabeth Warren agreed the DNC failed us miserably and again because of that we have Trump.
And in case you think this is just opinion/spin itself, check this out:
https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-pag...
There are foreign powers coughRUSSIAcough actively trying to disrupt/damage/destroy our democratic institutions. Considering the ongoing investigations by Mueller we still do not know if POTUS is a puppet, through threat of blackmail or evidence of dirty laundry, to Russian agents.
This a real thing. This is important.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jenna-abrams-russias-clown-tro...
https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/03/russian-facebook-pag...
Russia didn't win the election for Trump, but you are kidding yourself if you believe it didn't play a factor. US democracy has a lot of work to do, but Putin is an ex-KGB strongman who assassinates his opponents and annexes neighbors. It's pretty obvious how he operates.
such responses are often vacuous, if not intellectually dishonest. it's can seem like an effort to divert or sidetrack an argument or conversation with blatantly fallacious responses.
Then we have the DNC very literally and provably rigging the primaries in favor of Clinton.
You know what? I hate Trump. But give me a break. This Russia trash is just all a distraction. Trump blatantly supports unconstitutional programs like domestic surveillance and gitmo--this should be enough to impeach him alone for supporting an undermining of the US constitution and American's rights.
The fact that they need to rely on this Russia story which requires a number of shifting standards and "just trust us's", rather than in-the-open undemocratic authoritarianism here in the US, is probably a testament to failures of the human mind's ability to think in terms of, and stand up for, liberty.
I have been to Germany and Japan and the people are unbeleivably friendly and wonderful. What on earth is wrong with people that they can be coaxed into the evil dreams of tyrants--conflicts, authoritarianism--and is it happening again? Are we so different or special that we really think tyranny cant happen to us when we are going through the same patterns of history?
Probably, if we could just adjust the human factor of 'susceptability to sell their liberties and fall in line behind authority figures for short-sighted self-interest,' we would live in a much better world.
1 - https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/yet-another-major-russia...
Probably if we could just adjust human susceptability to sell their liberties and fall in line behind authority figures we would live in a much better world.
That only happens if you are realistic about what's going on instead of holding ideological political views. That's your solution.
There are lots of good reasons to oppose and impech Trump. Something is wrong if you can ignore the authoritarianism, corruption, and unconstitutionality that exists here in the US--that both parties support, which is why they won't use them as reasons to impeach Trump--and you have been coaxed into a need to make a reach for a dubious conflict-stirring story of half-truths and shifting standards.
You should ask yourself who the parties are that win after every election, no matter Republican or Democrat, and what they stand to gain or lose. Why you, instead, follow the machinations and war cry of authoritarians that have lost all credibility is probably a testament to the human bias to follow authority figures.
You cited a source which debunked the Russian hacking claims, but there's been a lot of evidence of Russian media influence (which is an obviously exploitable weakness).
This didn't have anything to do with Trump. You're reading a lot into what I'm saying.
Sometimes macroeconomists model concepts in the framework of households. Here is an analogy to help express where I am coming from: let's say every month your homeowners association has an election. For as long as anyone can ever remember, George and Barry win every time. Over the years they have installed security cameras inside your house, created conflicts with neighboring towns which profit their businesses and kill some of our children, and they have not done a very good job of taking care of the neighborhood.
Along comes Don. There are lots of good reasons to hate Don, but George and Barry start a campaign to get him out which involves Ted, an adversary from an entirely different, trashy neighborhood, who passed fliers around with fake information in hopes that Barry wouldnt be elected again.
I'm sitting in HOA meeting wondering why no one has brought up the security cameras inside my house, the fact that my best friend died due to George and Barry, JP & Morgan--who don't even live here--are getting a lot of our money for some reason, Barry's team is rigging the election process, and our neighborhood's health and environment is deteriorating. This was just a small start to a long list of terrible problems.
But George and Barry are running the meeting and Ted is the focus.
See, statements like this are a part of the problem. Obama did these things too and noone cared. Given that why should anyone believe anything anyone says? And into that vacuum, a new kind of influence emerges, one that is not about policies but just about "my team winning".
Most importantly, aiding and abetting covert influence should be a punishable crime. Current tech environment, where tech gaints simply saying they hadn't noticed is not an acceptable answer.
When you are a tech gaint, with power to influence so many people at once, you have the responsibility to be transparent.
With great power comes great responsibility. Not faux remorse after the fact.
When I personally talk about Russia, I just point out that this happened. This being the rise of fake news, etc.
We should remember it was the United States and her allies that normalized this behavior. We should take a few lessons from this, when we do something unethical or questionable these tactics are going to be normalized and other countries are going to use them.
Another example is Trump ordering an attack on a sovereign nation without that nation asking or any resolution passing in US Congress or the UNSC.
We need to understand that this is the age we live in, and that we need to work around fixing these issues. Not blaming others or trying to reverse technological processes.
Over 40 CIA working as 'journalists' and on the JFK assassination story in 1973. How many are CIA reporters today?
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-3...
e.g.
https://theintercept.com/2014/09/04/former-l-times-reporter-...
If you've read the Podesta emails you'll know how close the MSM and DNC are.
I don't doubt the RNC has the same type of relationships.
The word "hypornormalization" was created by a soviet thinker to describe the soviet world in the 1980s:
Nobody really believed in Communism anymore and everyone could tell everything is getting worse. The party leaders, factory managers, and government bureaucrats were all thieves who were telling ever more preposterous lies to the people about the state of the economy and the society. Nobody believed the lies, but they also couldn't perceive any alternative arrangement of affairs so they didn't know how to do anything except proceed as if they did believe the lies.
He then traces the rise of perception management, the rise of the banks and neoliberalism, and machinations in the middle east, along with the career of Donald Trump, and threads them all together as Curtis tends to do, to make the case that we are currently in a period of hypernormalization in the west.
What's interesting is that he makes the case that Trump is the perfect man for this time and place, being a phony made-for-TV businessman whose entire career is the triumph of perception over reality, and the movie was made in 2016: Trump wasn't even president yet.
As with all Curtis' stuff I only believe maybe 90% of it. The stuff on the middle east is the weakest. He's guilty of doing the same thing he accuses our political class of doing: oversimplifying things to the extent that he risks fictionalizing them. But it's an extremely interesting look at the current state of the western world.
Oh yeah and Russia features heavily in it, not just in the cautionary tale of the USSR, but at the same time Curtis is emphatic in emphasizing that the post-truth world wasn't conjured up in some Kremlin propaganda office. We've been working on building a post-truth world for ourselves for the past several decades.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aLQPNPlK5M
Wow, that pretty much describes exactly what happened in this[1] article in which coastal "third way" centrist consultants to the Democratic party interview midwesterners to figure out why they voted for Trump instead of Clinton and completely omit almost everything they are told in their final report which they carefully craft to reaffirm their preconceived worldview.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/on-safa...
No you don't get it. I am not American, but if I was, I would prefer Democrats, at least program-wise. And yet, I share the OP's opinion.
Here's the thing - before social media (which are much more open to public than traditional ones), the general intellectual idea was that more openness in democracy, despite its apparent weaknesses, actually makes the whole thing strong. So for example, military budgets were much more open in the U.S. than in the USSR; this openness could be considered a flaw from the strictly military POV, however, it actually makes everything more efficient because it doesn't let people in power cover more corruption. And so on, you could find many other examples.
However, recently (in the past 20 years), the liberals (in the U.S., you don't have mainstream left, so please don't call them that) have rejected the idea that openness makes the society stronger. And the outcry about social media is just a manifestation of that belief.
Now, the action depends on this belief. If you believe that openness is bad for society, you will favor the censorship of social media, and, taken to the logical conclusion, a very controlled society like Russia or China.
However, if you don't believe that openness is bad, then the proper reaction to existence of social media is to have more openness from the side of the government (and also perhaps industry). In other words, maybe people (on social media) are anxious for information (and so they fill the void with speculation), but the government is still keeping too much for themselves, much more than the social media would allow to be shared. But it will take some time to catch up, because of course existing bureaucrats are used to have their ways.
Just an example. If the U.S. government agencies truly believes that Russian manipulated the election, why don't they just share all the evidence openly, as soon as possible? Why don't they call specific sock-puppets out as being known to be Russian hackers? The reason why not is because institutionally, they are still living in the old paradigm, where secret service operations couldn't be in much public light, because historically, there was no good platform to disseminate this information (citizens couldn't easily use or cross-check it but it was valuable for the foreign actors). Of course, there might be more cynical reasons why is it that way.. but hopefully you get the point.
FWIW I would have voted Democrat both times.
But blaming new media for the losses is a huge, disingenuous cop out.
Looking next time, at how tough a third term is to get might work better. Making sure that the candidate has few ties to the previous, or both previous administrations from the same party might help more.
Tyler Cowen has a good article about it on Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-01/facebook-...
> But apparently a few hackers around the place were vastly better than them.
Yes, yes, this is entirely possible. Do you know how? People working during the campaign still do things very much by hand in ways they don't scale. They walk around canvasing etc. A hacker spins up 20 new AWS instances and have a semi-direct access to your brain.
clinton was also under fbi investigation, had wikileaks slow-dripping internal documents, and had a divided party (which clintonites didn't seem all that concerned about at the time).
And she just flat out cheated, in a way that was so easily discerned (even before this week's statements from Donna Brazille) that it almost definitely cost her tons of votes. As an individual she is by far the most responsible for Trump, especially considering that her campaign even sought to prop up Trump early in the race! And worst of all, she opted out of a landslide win by picking Tim Kaine instead of Sanders as VP.
I have no particular problem with investigating connections between Trump and Russia, but even if the worst of the allegations are true they 1) are about on par with Clinton's behavior in the election and 2) would barely make my top 20 list of appalling revelations regarding American politics. Americans need to step back and get some perspective -- as if the US doesn't do exactly the same or worse in almost every other country on earth.
Obama was lauded for using "Big Data" and "Data Science" to rally voters. It's not hard to guess where his team got the data from.
Now the same thing worked against, for better or worse, people are going out of the way to chastise social media.
Where was this concern when the same companies try and collect as much information as they can - user preferences, tastes, political bends - all in the name of "enhancing" experience. There were tons of articles written on praising the same companies on how clever they actually were.
Lastly, it is funny that economist etc are acting holier than thou when they themselves would be collecting some form of data from their readers to enhance ad revenues etc.
IMHO, its not social media rather letting the collection of personal information get out of hand which is at fault.
Ah, who am I kidding. Let's blame Zuckerberg and the Russians!
But Trump and his associates are also under investigation... And every single one of Trump's people are currently using private servers as well...
> Ah, who am I kidding. Let's blame Zuckerberg and the Russians!
Ah who am I kidding. You're already too far gone if this is how you think.
> You're already too far gone if this is how you think.
Please continue disregarding people who have a different viewpoint than yourself. It has worked very well for me.
Anyone here want to take a guess at which of these posts are paid propaganda? :P
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The reality is that if there were still journalists doing investigative journalism on par with Woodward and Bernstein and if Americans were getting their news from someone with the gravitas and ethical backbone of Edward R Murrow or Walter Cronkite, these "fake news" stories would be laughed at. But because our schools fail to teach critical thinking and our news either fails to inform people or cannot even interest people enough to watch, social media is the only way we have left for people to consume content and become educated. But since it's an open channel that anyone can participate in, is it any wonder that people would seek to co-opt it for their own purposes? It's little more than a modern day soap box and people have been bloviating their self-serving narratives that way for generations. What's changed isn't social media, it's the lack of adults with professional ethics supplying a baseline reality from which opinions must derive.
This is our generation's "yellow journalism" and it's a reminder of what happens when there's no one who takes on and is recognized for playing the role of establishing that baseline of accepted fact. Social media's reach is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
Which American news paper can you point out that's unbiased and isn't pushing some narrative. The truth is that printed press has been the megaphone of the ruling class since the beginning.
Apart from what are mostly just biased judgements used to drive forward the narrative, there are 2 basic misconceptions that the article is trying to pedal as fact.
1: That democracy is supposed to inherently solve these issues; there's a clear reason why America was not founded as a democratic country. The founders of the US saw democracy in the same way they viewed autocracy. They called for a careful balance of different political systems in order to minimize the harm of each of these. Democracy was specifically avoided because pure democracy quickly devolves (and is synonymous) to "mobocracy." The article tries to place the blame for this on everything other than the system itself. However, the reason why these issues exist even in a system that is partially democratic (and obviously much more democratic than it was when the United States (or any other country mentioned) was founded) is because they have not taken over. Mob rule is slow to come to power, and this should be a warning to people that we're nearing the edge of the cliff (rather than that some have cheated the system into submission). It's also worth noting that democracy should never imply a system in which everyone independently forms views, as that is quite clearly impossible. Leading to the second point:
2: "Outside influences" are supposedly ruining political discourse. This idea just makes no sense to me. The blame placed on Russia for influencing the 2016 election is effectively for generating discussion. It is not for changing votes, because as far as we know that was never done. It's also not for lying to people; to argue that Russia was in the wrong for lying to people is 100% disingenuous because the authors of this article are just as happy lying to people in order to drive forth their own narrative. It seemingly blames the increased political division on right-wing politics by arguing how everything from Gamergate to Wikipedia has caused people to become more right-leaning. Ignoring the fact that they mischaracterize the entire movement of Gamergate (equating it to alt-right politics by linking it to 4chan, when in fact Gamergate was almost exclusively originating from 8chan, saying that it is trolling rather than a legitimate opinion to hold, etc.) and lie about Wikipedia's political agenda (it's quite easy to see that the major editors on Wikipedia are heavily left-leaning based on the frequent bans given to right-leaning editors), it's immediately clear from the graph showing party division that Democrats have "radicalized" far more than their Republican counterparts. In this scenario, they are using blatant lies and scare tactics to get across their opinion. How is this different at all from what they blame Russia/right-wing media/4chan for? Sure Russia might be using fake accounts to manipulate the public, but if the only solutions you can propose are limiting freedom of speech, you are doing much more to ruin democracy.
The root problem is this: America has slipped for a long time now. It has at its core been corrupted systemically by a destructive value system. Its culture is now based on the idea that to dominate those around oneself is the right thing to do (on a personal, social, national, international and worldwide level).
And those who feel the need to play this game will dominate. They will reinforce and perpetuate this vicious circle - until society collapses. So you might want start counteracting now.