Sure, but their ads aren't tailor made to each user. We all see the same ones, one about Mailchimp and another for a vodka. Which means no profiling so there's no violation of users' privacy.
These ads are not intrusive. You can read the article perfectly. They are not obstructing your experience.
You, however, is consuming their content and blocking their advertisers...
News media is still the primary way of keeping the populace informed. The populace being informed is essential to them making good decisions when voting, without it democracy becomes a sham.
This means that if being a journalist in news media is not "gainful employment in a stable industry that pays them consistently for their work" then we are going to have some serious problems as a society.
No, we don't. Content on the web was free for years, and on the internet for decades, without a single ad anywhere.
The only things that need to be paid for are the physical infrastructure and power usage, employee salaries, etc (typical business costs,) but not the content, and not necessarily through advertising.
That's a good question, and I don't have a good answer, but I don't believe the answer is advertising. Not because of any anti-capitalist aversion to it on my part, but because the web wasn't designed to allow for it, and I believe the model is doomed to fail in the long run.
Every other media paradigm is centrally controlled and has its equivalent of Arbitron/Nielsen to extrapolate audience size and attention through polling without directly interfering with privacy or taking control away from the viewer or listener. Unless I'm wrong, advertising on the web requires ever increasingly intrusive and fine-grained analytics to accomplish the same thing, in a medium which is designed to give the end user the ability to arbitrarily filter responses.
In my opinion, the only reason advertising ever worked on the web to begin with was that neither browser makers nor the browsing public were savvy enough in the beginning to do much about it, but now ad blocking is becoming more and more common, and the browsing public is less and less willing to tolerate ads.
Sites can be paid for by charging directly for access, or funding through alternate means like Patreon. Content on the web doesn't have to be funded through the web, after all, plenty of people run sites on shared servers that don't make money. A lot of Youtubers are running sponsored ads directly in their videos because of Youtube's demonetization attempts. There are bound to be numerous alternatives to direct advertising that might be more acceptable to the end user, but we might also have to accept that most content on the web doesn't bring the end user value worth paying for.
There are so many companies that collect and sell data on Americans that I don't understand why our Congress is grandstanding on Facebook. Hello credit card companies?
These hearings seem more political based on Facebooks percieved biases than focused on protecting consumers.
Honest question - why should we believe Equifax would act differently from Facebook?
Are there additional regulations or something? Every company under the sun wants to do credit checks before they do business with me; and they often don't ask me about it in advance. Is there some mechanism that would make that data less valuable to them if they wanted to do political targeting?
I don't take it as a given that Equifax would be more careful with my data than Facebook is, but maybe I'm missing something about how credit regulations work?
Facebook gathered data. They shared some of that data with other companies. They allowed those companies to use the data to manipulate the viewpoints of users. This manipulation was done covertly during an election year.
This is different to the excessive data collection that other companies do. I'd welcome greater scrutiny of the data as a company asset model of service provision, but we need to be aware that there's a spread of behaviour.
Because FB is the most visible example of it. c.f. fraud and embezzlement enforcement. Regardless, whatever comes out of the case w.r.t. FB will determine policy for the other personal-data companies.
FB was very visible earlier too, and the influence it weilded was well known. It was just extremely upsetting that the other side used it this time, and won.
Political narratives world over, have always been monopolized by the left, via institutional control. When narratives are democratized, they invariably move to the right. Social media has democratized setting of the narrative, and that is the reason that we are seeing a wave of right wing populism across the world, from India to UK to the US.
The clampdown on Facebook is an attempt to regain institutional control of the current most valuable means of setting political narrative.
>"Political narratives world over, have always been monopolized by the left, via institutional control. When narratives are democratized, they invariably move to the right."
Haha what? Nevermind the nonsense of dividing the world into "left" and "right", you are also absolutely wrong.
Please back up your claims, because I see a hell of a lot of conservative media coverage control, all over the world.
>There are so many companies that collect and sell data on Americans that I don't understand why our Congress is grandstanding on Facebook. Hello credit card companies?
Maybe it is time for you to also get privacy laws where my data is mine and don't belong to the company that store it for me. You can use the data for what you need it to, but should not be allowed to sell or give it to any 3rd party without asking me if I allow it every time you want to share it.
And Obama’s and Hillary used Facebook directly with the cooperation of Facebook. Cambridge was just a proxy for what Democrat candidates were getting for free. It doesn’t make it right but it’s a false equivalence to condemn Cruz for Cambridge without condemning Facebook itself for the other candidates.
Equating what Obama/Clinton did with what Cambridge Analytica did is a false equivalence. The data Obama/Clinton collected was given voluntarily with users understanding more or less what it was going to be used for through apps that were overtly connected to their campaigns. The data Cambridge Analytica collected was collected by tricking users into giving it to them with fake quizzes with users having no idea what the data was going to be used for.
Don't want to take Zuck's side, but reaching such conclusion from only two or three sentences seems a bit unfair and misleading.
The title sounds great though...
Ditto this. The article doesn’t say much of anything at all and makes giant jumps in logic based on a few quotes without full context.
Honestly I have been somewhat impressed with Zuckerberg’s handling of this situation, at least in comparison to public statements from other companies when it comes to issues about users and data privacy. However I am still
pessimistic about the potential for any useful action after all of this kerfuffle around FB and CA.
As much as I loathe too I have to defend Facebook. Not to say the data collection practices are not
egregious ,let's not forget that these are industry-wide practices and that the hearings have less to do with protecting users than it is political grand standing. Experian, anyone?
It's almost as if we've collectively forgotten the data breaches of the last 12 months and how exposed American and EU citizens are now to fraud because of lax security practices by credit scoring companies.
I guess the difference is that Facebook is actively sharing this data and Experian was hacked, because their breach was the action of an external agent, they are less culpable.
From the UK it looks like this. Trump used data, Facebook helped, politicians are upset that Trump was helped by the Facebook platform (conveniently forgetting that every campaign before that has used large amounts of Facebook user data), let's punish Facebook.
Facebook doesn't care about users, but politicians who have the power to change this care even less.
something about society too, how much users really care ?
people may complain, rant, scream, walk, strike .. but do they really want privacy ? and do they know how to define it ? at what cost (going off facebook/web ? paying for guarantees?, doing paper work to ensure political class write these down as laws ?)
I would say “curating” of political ideas is a big issue. See Ted Cruz’s questioning of Zuckerberg as an example. It’s not just data but how Facebook has such a dominant role in steering political discourse. There are more issues at play than simple data hygiene.
What I'm really curious about is the psychology of people that makes them engage in this whataboutism that's present in almost every post about Facebook and this data issue. By the way, both Equifax (American based) and Experian (Irish) are subject to way more regulation than Facebook, which is currently none AFAIK.
P.S. Though Experian had a minor data breach in 2015 you're most likely referring to the far larger (order magnitude higher) Equifax breach.
Instead of thinking about the inner factors to whataboutism, I'd look at what factors predict the tactic's success for more insight into why that technique is effective. What enables the tactical fruitfulness of pointing a finger the other way?
I might be able to satisfy your curiosity. People indulge in whataboutism for the fairly straightforward reason that they dislike hypocrisy and have a sense of fairness and would like everyone to be held to the same standards.
Not when they're using imaginary others as an excuse to not hold it to that standard themselves. When A is criticized, it's "what about B?", and the other way around. The real question is, what about them? A is criticized, for reasons X, and instead of having a position on that, they talk about some imaginary other monolith that doesn't criticize B when B wasn't even mentioned until they brought it up.
So to say that has somehow to do with a heightened intellectual honesty, is like saying they're shitting on the floor to make it cleaner. Maybe in their mind that's what they think they're doing.
I know I get accused of it when I'm honestly trying to understand why people are okay with one instance, but not another. Did they just not know about the it? Am I missing some context? Is it okay with them if it's "their side"? Something else?
It's really frustrating and largely makes me think they don't want to admit to themselves that they are being biased for one reason or another.
> Let's not forget that these are industry-wide practices and that the hearings have less to do with protecting users than it is political grand standing.
One of the themes of the hearing was that these industry wide practices have gone on too long without governmental oversight.
> From the UK it looks like this. Trump used data, Facebook helped, politicians are upset that Trump was helped by the Facebook platform (conveniently forgetting that every campaign before that has used large amounts of Facebook user data), let's punish Facebook.
Bingo we have a winner.
That's exactly what this is really about...nothing more. Our media and political masters are still in deep shock that Trump usurped them and stole the most coveted position from them as an outsider.
Heads must roll! Talk about not caring about it "users"...almost half the population of the US voted for Trump, and these elites couldn't care less about them or the message they are obviously trying to send.
Pretty funny that in the preceding years they gave for free the same data to the Obama administration. Then they sell it for the Trump campaign and all hell breaks loose. Maybe facebook should have given that away for free too?
It's pretty obvious there's a huge double standard going on here that's totally being ignored. I find it funny at how willing the left is to self destruct without thinking.
Who gave the data (what data?) for free? Facebook? Cambridge Analytical?
Iiuc the whole brouhaha comes from 2 facts.
1. An old app (some survey app) sold it's data against fb's terms of services to an outside group.
2. Fb's access rights used to Grant access to the info not only of the user of the app but also that user's friends and thus ballooned from 700k users to 50+ million.
Now as far as allowing political campaigns to target people for all kinds of criteria I am sure that is still happening and how all advertising works...
I despise Trump and I despise the dishonest, manipulative way he ran his campaign, but some of the recent coverage smacks to me of people just coming up with more excuses to get around the fact that a lot of people voted for him.
We have a habit of being kind of condescending towards rural voters, and the trend towards, 'you didn't have any agency, you were just manipulated into this' is uncomfortable to me.
I feel like Gerrymandering is a separate conversation.
I'm sympathetic to people who feel like Hillary should have won based on popular vote, but even if Hillary had won, that's still 46% of the population who voted against her, and I still think it's dangerous to chock a number like that up to "well, the Russians meddled and Facebook is evil."
A lot of people consciously chose to vote for Trump, not because they were mind controlled, but because they actually thought he was the best candidate.
I live in Oklahoma. People vote against her here because she's on the other team and 2+ decades of Republicans smearing her. 46% against concerns you more than 48% against? Lmfao.
Oklahoma is a subsidized state full of ignorant people for the most part. I live in an "educated" town and its abysmal here just the same.
So when propaganda/marketing to people that don't even understand the basics, Hillary gonna take UR guns and murder them babbies, sells quite well. All the while everything is reverting to the ownership class.
I'm well off so it will all be fine for me, but for the working middle-class and poor. It's only going to get worse, and voting for Republicans for the past 4 decades has clearly shown that to be the case.
> "Oh, I really don't understand American demographics very well."
Every few years, something pops up that shows most of us don't understand our own demographics. Such as polls where the majority of Americans estimate the black population to be around 40% (it's actually around 10-15%), or the LGBT population around 20-30% (it's actually around 5%, maybe even lower), or, well, the Trump election.
My personal take: The media was so focused on Trump's personality quirks that, however bad they are, it seemed like they had nothing bad to say about his actual ability, accidentally making him appear like a pretty good candidate (especially compared to the actually-relevant-to-the-job controversies around Clinton, like email security). So while I was a bit surprised that he won, I always expected it to be a close race.
I think ability-vs-personality is one of those things that people largely mistake what other people will care about.
I remember hearing Podesta in an interview on NPR a few days before the election and at that point, hearing Podesta talk, I realized that Trump had a very good chance of winning. Podesta gave Trump way too much credibility despite everything that had already happened in the campaign.
Gerrymandering has nothing to do with the electoral college.
I'll say it again: Gerrymandering has nothing to do with the electoral college.
Unless you think that state lines were drawn (all at the latest in 1866, when the last gray area between Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada was cleared up) with modern political considerations in mind, gerrymandering (the manipulation of electoral boundaries for some political purpose) has nothing to do with the electoral college.
Sure it does. Republicans use gerrymandering to maintain control and then roll out voter suppression programs under the guise of real id or random re-registration or whatever. Statistically voter fraud is a non issue. Republicans know that their base is dwindling and in the long term the US will become more democratic. As people live closer together and see the impact of policies on other humans they tend to become more sympathetic and democratic. Bush won the Presidency because of the supreme court split based on politics. Trump lost the popular vote. This is why Republicans fought tooth and nail to ensure that Obama couldn't appoint a supreme court justice. They want to maintain a conservative judiciary. Controlling the court, they can limit liberal interpretations of the law. The second amendment reinterpretation hinged on a fucking comma. There shrinking base is is why they defund education and court the evangelical vote. It's why they argue for faith based charities instead of government support. It aligns with the rich paying less taxes and it is the rich who fund this nonsense.
> 2.9 million more votes is a big fucking deal IMO>
Not at all, really...it's simple economics to see why this is so.
You see, Trump didn't have to win the popular vote, he had to win the electoral college to become President, and because of this, all sort of possibilities emerge about being KILLED in the pop vote and winning elections.
Trump hardly spent a dime in CA...therefore in the most populous state he handed Clinton a huge pop vote tally. But he very wisely chose to spend his money and time in swing states like MI and OH and others where a much smaller vote count could swing the election to his favor.
I could do the math for you, but that would be I think too reductionist.
What it says is that she managed to win something that only she was trying for, at the cost of losing the presidency. It seems pretty clear that the Clinton campaign took resources away from states she needed to win the election and put them into boosting turnout in safe states to make sure she won the popular vote, based on the arrogant assumption that the presidency was hers for sure and a complete failure to actually pay enough attention to those states to realise how screwed she was until far too late. The Trump campaign, on the other hand, knew they had to focus all their resources on winning to stand a chance and seem to have done a much better job of updating their assumptions based on new evidence.
As an outsider that's taken keen interest in U.S. politics for quite a while now, your despising his dishonest and manipulative campaign sells short basically every political campaign for as long as I can remember. They've all basically been a shit storm of the worst of human behaviour and then you all complain when your elected President fails to act with honour. The reaction Americans have in response to this is absurd, bordering on farcical.
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
> We have a habit of being kind of condescending towards rural voters, and the trend towards, 'you didn't have any agency, you were just manipulated into this' is uncomfortable to me.
The reality is that these "rural" voters almost surely have far more agency then any typical city dweller does due to the nature of the environment in which each lives, so it's just a fucking joke that Trump "duped" these "dumb hicks" into voting for him.
Psst...come closer...you want to hear the real reason he won???
H. Clinton was without any doubt the absolute worse candidate in the history of 20th and 21st century politics. period end-of-story.
> ...almost half the population of the US voted for Trump
Well that's obviously not true.
Edit: I understand what I hope you're trying to stay, that almost have of the people who cast votes in the US Presidential election voted for Trump, but when using statistics in an argument, it's important to correctly represent the data.
Implying that half of the US voted for Trump is dishonest, even when 'the US' is defined as "eligible voters".
Exactly, because the DNC (Hillary, Obama) used the same data techniques. The head of Hillary's election marketing even tweeted about this and was a catalyst for the recent news, but not a peep from the media.
> ...almost half the population fo the US voted for Trump
Not even close to true. Approx 63 million voted for Trump, which is 25% of the US voting population of 250 million [0], and only 20% of the overall US population. Also...more people voted for his main opponent.
Trump was bankrolled by a couple of elites as well as being an elite himself if you believe he's a billionaire. This is just a changing of the guard. Same thing happened with the tea party. In fact Trump hijacked the tea party. Removing the CA profiles won't stop the same electioneering that happened. What really is the problem are the trolls and the Russian/foreign money.
> let's not forget that these are industry-wide practices and that the hearings have less to do with protecting users than it is political grand standing.
Actually, we're already seeing some real action from Congress. The author of COPPA introduced the CONSENT Act, which seems to bring parts of GDPR to the US.
The "catch" is that it only applies to "edge providers" (online services), but not ISPs, which I think is FINE. That's a battle for another day.
After all, remember how Google helped in the openness or copyright fights against the ISPs and content providers in the early days (which of course directly helped Google to grow even more as a company)? And now we're stuck with tech companies becoming dangerous monopolies, too.
My point is that I don't mind ISPs actually supporting legislation like this, as long as the legislation makes sense against that group of companies. Once Democrats get back in power, I think we'll have a good chance to pass a net neutrality law as well as a broadband/wireless privacy act, too.
The senators only have 5 minutes each so all there is time for is a bit of grandstanding. Anything you try and go deeper on Zuck will just kill time for 5 minutes.
> From the UK it looks like this. Trump used data, Facebook helped, politicians are upset that Trump was helped by the Facebook platform (conveniently forgetting that every campaign before that has used large amounts of Facebook user data), let's punish Facebook.
Actually, I think that a lot of it is pro-Trump misdirection. The focus on Facebook in the media (which even though, yes, it is about something that ultimately served Trump, rarely mentions Trump, or the aspects, like the CA-Russia connections, that connect the affair to other Trump scandals) is a distraction from the Trump Administration scandals, especially as the tone and focus of the response is concerns about the role of and potential need to regulsate the “big tech companies”.
If this was about outrage at Trump, Steve Bannon would be on the Congressional hot seat, not Mark Zuckerberg.
Experian et al do not have a two-way channel they can use to run psychological experiments based on your usage data and communications with others. Facebook can, and does.
These hearings are just the tip of the iceberg. You're like the guy saying Bitcoin has hit its peak at $100.
I highly recommend listening to Sheryl Sandberg's interview with NPR from last week. It is a great example of the manner in which people behave in order to successfully stay out of jail.
I don't know whether or how it is illegal, but the way she talks is a great example of how everyone should interact with law enforcement... acknowledge and agree with the concern but do not answer any questions or provide any information.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadGhostery did catch some trackers though, including Facebook's.
(By adblocking I don't mean like AdBlock Plus I mean more like uBlock Origin.)
This means that if being a journalist in news media is not "gainful employment in a stable industry that pays them consistently for their work" then we are going to have some serious problems as a society.
The only things that need to be paid for are the physical infrastructure and power usage, employee salaries, etc (typical business costs,) but not the content, and not necessarily through advertising.
Every other media paradigm is centrally controlled and has its equivalent of Arbitron/Nielsen to extrapolate audience size and attention through polling without directly interfering with privacy or taking control away from the viewer or listener. Unless I'm wrong, advertising on the web requires ever increasingly intrusive and fine-grained analytics to accomplish the same thing, in a medium which is designed to give the end user the ability to arbitrarily filter responses.
In my opinion, the only reason advertising ever worked on the web to begin with was that neither browser makers nor the browsing public were savvy enough in the beginning to do much about it, but now ad blocking is becoming more and more common, and the browsing public is less and less willing to tolerate ads.
Sites can be paid for by charging directly for access, or funding through alternate means like Patreon. Content on the web doesn't have to be funded through the web, after all, plenty of people run sites on shared servers that don't make money. A lot of Youtubers are running sponsored ads directly in their videos because of Youtube's demonetization attempts. There are bound to be numerous alternatives to direct advertising that might be more acceptable to the end user, but we might also have to accept that most content on the web doesn't bring the end user value worth paying for.
"Problems with your business model is not society's problem"
These hearings seem more political based on Facebooks percieved biases than focused on protecting consumers.
Are there additional regulations or something? Every company under the sun wants to do credit checks before they do business with me; and they often don't ask me about it in advance. Is there some mechanism that would make that data less valuable to them if they wanted to do political targeting?
I don't take it as a given that Equifax would be more careful with my data than Facebook is, but maybe I'm missing something about how credit regulations work?
This is different to the excessive data collection that other companies do. I'd welcome greater scrutiny of the data as a company asset model of service provision, but we need to be aware that there's a spread of behaviour.
Those other companies haven't arguably violated a consent decree with the FTC as Facebook has.
FB was very visible earlier too, and the influence it weilded was well known. It was just extremely upsetting that the other side used it this time, and won.
Political narratives world over, have always been monopolized by the left, via institutional control. When narratives are democratized, they invariably move to the right. Social media has democratized setting of the narrative, and that is the reason that we are seeing a wave of right wing populism across the world, from India to UK to the US.
The clampdown on Facebook is an attempt to regain institutional control of the current most valuable means of setting political narrative.
Haha what? Nevermind the nonsense of dividing the world into "left" and "right", you are also absolutely wrong.
Please back up your claims, because I see a hell of a lot of conservative media coverage control, all over the world.
Maybe it is time for you to also get privacy laws where my data is mine and don't belong to the company that store it for me. You can use the data for what you need it to, but should not be allowed to sell or give it to any 3rd party without asking me if I allow it every time you want to share it.
Look how much people spend on a SuperBowl commercial, it's clear Facebook still has a massive audience and that's the value.
Honestly I have been somewhat impressed with Zuckerberg’s handling of this situation, at least in comparison to public statements from other companies when it comes to issues about users and data privacy. However I am still pessimistic about the potential for any useful action after all of this kerfuffle around FB and CA.
It's almost as if we've collectively forgotten the data breaches of the last 12 months and how exposed American and EU citizens are now to fraud because of lax security practices by credit scoring companies.
I guess the difference is that Facebook is actively sharing this data and Experian was hacked, because their breach was the action of an external agent, they are less culpable.
From the UK it looks like this. Trump used data, Facebook helped, politicians are upset that Trump was helped by the Facebook platform (conveniently forgetting that every campaign before that has used large amounts of Facebook user data), let's punish Facebook.
Facebook doesn't care about users, but politicians who have the power to change this care even less.
people may complain, rant, scream, walk, strike .. but do they really want privacy ? and do they know how to define it ? at what cost (going off facebook/web ? paying for guarantees?, doing paper work to ensure political class write these down as laws ?)
P.S. Though Experian had a minor data breach in 2015 you're most likely referring to the far larger (order magnitude higher) Equifax breach.
So to say that has somehow to do with a heightened intellectual honesty, is like saying they're shitting on the floor to make it cleaner. Maybe in their mind that's what they think they're doing.
It's really frustrating and largely makes me think they don't want to admit to themselves that they are being biased for one reason or another.
One of the themes of the hearing was that these industry wide practices have gone on too long without governmental oversight.
Bingo we have a winner.
That's exactly what this is really about...nothing more. Our media and political masters are still in deep shock that Trump usurped them and stole the most coveted position from them as an outsider.
Heads must roll! Talk about not caring about it "users"...almost half the population of the US voted for Trump, and these elites couldn't care less about them or the message they are obviously trying to send.
It's pretty obvious there's a huge double standard going on here that's totally being ignored. I find it funny at how willing the left is to self destruct without thinking.
Iiuc the whole brouhaha comes from 2 facts. 1. An old app (some survey app) sold it's data against fb's terms of services to an outside group. 2. Fb's access rights used to Grant access to the info not only of the user of the app but also that user's friends and thus ballooned from 700k users to 50+ million.
Now as far as allowing political campaigns to target people for all kinds of criteria I am sure that is still happening and how all advertising works...
I despise Trump and I despise the dishonest, manipulative way he ran his campaign, but some of the recent coverage smacks to me of people just coming up with more excuses to get around the fact that a lot of people voted for him.
We have a habit of being kind of condescending towards rural voters, and the trend towards, 'you didn't have any agency, you were just manipulated into this' is uncomfortable to me.
2.9 million more votes is a big fucking deal IMO>
https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary...
I'm sympathetic to people who feel like Hillary should have won based on popular vote, but even if Hillary had won, that's still 46% of the population who voted against her, and I still think it's dangerous to chock a number like that up to "well, the Russians meddled and Facebook is evil."
A lot of people consciously chose to vote for Trump, not because they were mind controlled, but because they actually thought he was the best candidate.
Oklahoma is a subsidized state full of ignorant people for the most part. I live in an "educated" town and its abysmal here just the same.
So when propaganda/marketing to people that don't even understand the basics, Hillary gonna take UR guns and murder them babbies, sells quite well. All the while everything is reverting to the ownership class.
I'm well off so it will all be fine for me, but for the working middle-class and poor. It's only going to get worse, and voting for Republicans for the past 4 decades has clearly shown that to be the case.
So... yeah. 46% for is more surprising to me than 48% against.
I honestly expected closer to 60% against. My takeaway from election night was, "Oh, I really don't understand American demographics very well."
Every few years, something pops up that shows most of us don't understand our own demographics. Such as polls where the majority of Americans estimate the black population to be around 40% (it's actually around 10-15%), or the LGBT population around 20-30% (it's actually around 5%, maybe even lower), or, well, the Trump election.
My personal take: The media was so focused on Trump's personality quirks that, however bad they are, it seemed like they had nothing bad to say about his actual ability, accidentally making him appear like a pretty good candidate (especially compared to the actually-relevant-to-the-job controversies around Clinton, like email security). So while I was a bit surprised that he won, I always expected it to be a close race.
I think ability-vs-personality is one of those things that people largely mistake what other people will care about.
I'll say it again: Gerrymandering has nothing to do with the electoral college.
Unless you think that state lines were drawn (all at the latest in 1866, when the last gray area between Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada was cleared up) with modern political considerations in mind, gerrymandering (the manipulation of electoral boundaries for some political purpose) has nothing to do with the electoral college.
What I was getting at is that the actual winner of the election wouldn't change anything about the 46% of voters who chose Trump over Hillary.
That speaks of problems and divides that are deeper than Facebook.
To me the bigger issue though is the 45% of eligible voters who didn't bother to show up (or were prevented from showing up).
Not at all, really...it's simple economics to see why this is so.
You see, Trump didn't have to win the popular vote, he had to win the electoral college to become President, and because of this, all sort of possibilities emerge about being KILLED in the pop vote and winning elections.
Trump hardly spent a dime in CA...therefore in the most populous state he handed Clinton a huge pop vote tally. But he very wisely chose to spend his money and time in swing states like MI and OH and others where a much smaller vote count could swing the election to his favor.
I could do the math for you, but that would be I think too reductionist.
there are some really good youtube videos about the US electoral college and what a vote in Montana is worth compared to a vote in California
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
If you want better, do better.
> We have a habit of being kind of condescending towards rural voters, and the trend towards, 'you didn't have any agency, you were just manipulated into this' is uncomfortable to me.
The reality is that these "rural" voters almost surely have far more agency then any typical city dweller does due to the nature of the environment in which each lives, so it's just a fucking joke that Trump "duped" these "dumb hicks" into voting for him.
Psst...come closer...you want to hear the real reason he won???
H. Clinton was without any doubt the absolute worse candidate in the history of 20th and 21st century politics. period end-of-story.
Well that's obviously not true.
Edit: I understand what I hope you're trying to stay, that almost have of the people who cast votes in the US Presidential election voted for Trump, but when using statistics in an argument, it's important to correctly represent the data.
Implying that half of the US voted for Trump is dishonest, even when 'the US' is defined as "eligible voters".
It was the Russians....lol.
Ahem.. almost half the voting population voted for Trump. That is no where near half the actual population.
Perhaps being gullible enough to believe your vote will matter overlaps largely with gullible enough to vote for Trump.
Not even close to true. Approx 63 million voted for Trump, which is 25% of the US voting population of 250 million [0], and only 20% of the overall US population. Also...more people voted for his main opponent.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St...
Actually, we're already seeing some real action from Congress. The author of COPPA introduced the CONSENT Act, which seems to bring parts of GDPR to the US.
https://www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CONSENT%20Act%20...
The "catch" is that it only applies to "edge providers" (online services), but not ISPs, which I think is FINE. That's a battle for another day.
After all, remember how Google helped in the openness or copyright fights against the ISPs and content providers in the early days (which of course directly helped Google to grow even more as a company)? And now we're stuck with tech companies becoming dangerous monopolies, too.
My point is that I don't mind ISPs actually supporting legislation like this, as long as the legislation makes sense against that group of companies. Once Democrats get back in power, I think we'll have a good chance to pass a net neutrality law as well as a broadband/wireless privacy act, too.
Actually, I think that a lot of it is pro-Trump misdirection. The focus on Facebook in the media (which even though, yes, it is about something that ultimately served Trump, rarely mentions Trump, or the aspects, like the CA-Russia connections, that connect the affair to other Trump scandals) is a distraction from the Trump Administration scandals, especially as the tone and focus of the response is concerns about the role of and potential need to regulsate the “big tech companies”.
If this was about outrage at Trump, Steve Bannon would be on the Congressional hot seat, not Mark Zuckerberg.
These hearings are just the tip of the iceberg. You're like the guy saying Bitcoin has hit its peak at $100.
Maybe it's unethical, but is it? When people signed up, wtf did they think was going to happen to their data?