Sick of it reading this kind of childish lines, nowadayds, even in New Yorker!
“For many years, it was, like, ‘Your LinkedIn thing is going to be crushed, so even though we’re friendly, I don’t want to get too close to you personally, because I’m going to crush you.’ Now, of course, that’s behind us and we’re good friends.”
Does anyone outside media think Facebook matters when it comes to politics? Has anyone ever changed their mind or their vote because of something on Facebook? It's largely an echo chamber.
That's exactly the problem. Facebook bubbles tell you your view is just fine as it is, and in fact you should probably radicalize your view to better conform with the click worthy voices you hear.
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? People are increasingly retreating into echo chambers that present no contradictory opinions. And now those echo chambers are being used to slip in incorrect facts and twisted opinions. People increasingly accept outlandish positions and the whole political spectrum is getting more polarized.
CNN documented that the Russians pushed propaganda on both sides, once having helped plan a protest and a counter protest at once. Their plan to disrupt democracy is very much helped by echo chambers.
Aren't echo chambers mostly self organizing? I just see this as a general problem and not something unique to Facebook.
Culturally we seem to be moving increasingly towards echo chambers as we are losing the social skills to be capable of engaging in dialog without immediately collapsing into emotional rants.
Exactly. Facebook isn't dramatically different than your local pub, church, Elks lodge, knitting club, or any other self-selected social group. Singling them out and treating it like a new problem gives too much credence to the notion that it's a new thing.
Think today's politics are divisive? Look back to the mass social unrest and violence of the entire 20th century (or farther, at all of human history). This is not a new phenomenon, and there's nothing unique about Facebook, the Internet, social media, or technology.
> Exactly. Facebook isn't dramatically different than your local pub, church, Elks lodge, knitting club, or any other self-selected social group. Singling them out and treating it like a new problem gives too much credence to the notion that it's a new thing.
No. Facebook (and web echo chambers in general) are dramatically different. Because the available online population is so much larger than a physical community, narrower and louder echo chambers are possible. Back in the offline days echo chambers were more self-limited and internally more diverse, because the smaller pool of possible members meant too much exclusion would make the group too small to be sustainable. Now, every crazy fringe idea can have a Facebook group of 500 active members egging each other on, and use targeted ads to easily suck in every susceptible person.
When you can create "lookalike audiences" and target political ads at people that will feed off their fears it's quite easy to see what the problem is.
It's really, really hard to see in yourself when you're being turned into an extremist by an echo chamber. It's a self feeding cycle. The more extreme you get the more extreme your filter bubble becomes. It looks normal to you at any point in time. It happens slowly over time and it's hard to notice. If you're lucky one day you go to smoke it up with your hippie friends and you realize they're all talking about bail reform, solar power and sustainable ways to raise beef and you're talking about toppling statues, silencing wrongthink and seizing the means of production and realize that something has changed. Some people realize they've been radicalized and step back. Others think their friends have gone soft and double down on their new ideology. Most will never see the change because it happens so slowly.
It is not so much about changing the beliefs of a potential voter as modifying their behaviour. In this case giving them enough of a reason to stay at home rather than vote. As the article states:
> During the campaign, Trump used Facebook to raise two
> hundred and eighty million dollars. Just days before
> the election, his team paid for a voter-suppression
> effort on the platform. According to Bloomberg
> Businessweek, it targeted three Democratic
> constituencies—“idealistic white liberals, young women,
> and African Americans”—sending them videos precisely
> tailored to discourage them from turning out for Clinton.
> Theresa Hong, the Trump campaign’s digital-content
> director, later told an interviewer, “Without Facebook
> we wouldn’t have won.”
So, I'm not a Republican, and I didn't vote for DT, but the left's response to the 2016 election is really disappointing. It has been essentially a long list of reasons why they lost other than, "we didn't appeal to quite enough of the electorate". It was Russia, it was Facebook, it was everyone's a racist, it was anything other than something the Democratic party did or didn't do.
Facebook has issues, but the idea that it will "break democracy" is absurd, and kind of offensive.
But they did appeal to enough of the electorate. Clinton received ~3% more votes, which was in line with the polling data.
Unfortunately, because we have a system that makes certain Midwest and rust belt votes worth 3-10x more, Clinton lost anyway.
Most of what people have been complaining about actually happened. Russia really did interfere. Facebook turned a blind eye to massive misinformation campaigns on their platform. Facebook also knew about the Cambridge Analytica breach for quite a while before making it public. A lot of the voting and ads for Trump were driven by latent (or not so latent) racism.
It's not Facebook's "fault" that these things are happening any more than it's paper's fault if someone makes a racist poster. However, we can't ask paper to help us protect systems of election and governance that were invented before instant global communication.
Facebook is "just a platform," but we have the unique ability to ask the platform for help ensuring against abuse. I believe we must try to do that.
You seem to be using a metric we don’t use in this country.
Trump received 304 votes compared to Clinton’s 227.
People don’t vote for a president, they vote to direct whole their state votes. Each state vote is worth the same with larger states having more of them. This is the system we’ve had for 240 years.
While there is a legitimate debate to be had about whether the electoral college is good or not, it is not new, and the Democrats knew about it before the 2016 election (we hope). They surely should have noticed it after the 2000 election. In 2009 they held all the levers of power, and could have chosen to eliminate it via constitutional amendment, but did not. Regardless of your opinion on whether they should have or not, they knew that the electoral college existed, that the Rust Belt would be important, and they chose their candidate and election strategy with full knowledge. It's also the same system that elected Obama, twice, and also Bill Clinton.
> But they did appeal to enough of the electorate. Clinton received ~3% more votes, which was in line with the polling data.
No, they didn't. The right and correct way to count votes isn't the method that would've given your side a victory; it's the way that was prescribed by the law as it existed at the time of the election.
> Unfortunately, because we have a system that makes certain Midwest and rust belt votes worth 3-10x more
This is the the result of a very old compromise. Maybe it should be reevaluated, but that's a separate issue.
I agree. There was some examination of why he may have won in the first weeks after the election, but that aspect of the conversation has largely disappeared.
It's now all about the dark art of "fake news", almost as if, since he was elected illegitimately, none of the reasons he may have been elected matter.
I wonder if we'd even be having this discussion if Trump hadn't been elected. Probably at some level but not to the degree it has been.
Democracy is “broken” for a variety of reasons, including deep problems with the parties themselves. But the role of news media in democracy is critical (in both senses of the word), and the rise of Facebook and other media based on unmoderated positive feedback loops is certainly not helping.
The tendency of old media to blame it has more to do with how much it threatens their bottom line than it does how much it's an actual threat to democracy though.
I think the premise is reasonable that FB (and other gigantic social networks) might be hurting democracy to some extent, but I also agree that the extent described here is absurd. However, perhaps ironically, I think the commonly held opinion you're expressing is actually dangerous. It's bad that people "blame" things too freely for their team's loss in democratic elections, but it's unavoidable, and while I do think there's more of it this time around, I think it's only because of a combination of two things: 1. There's more stuff to blame this time (right or wrong). 2. The winning team had a more mocking and disrespectful tone this time, openly represented even by the winning candidate himself, which is highly unusual.
My point is that your list isn't mutually exclusive (Facebook, interference, racism, bad Democratic candidate), and, anecdotally, every human being I know in person agrees those are all real issues that contributed, and only disagree on degrees, and those disagreements have always been reasonable. What I think is dangerous is broadly dismissing all those issues under the umbrella of "you lost, deal with it." Irrational blame-seekers will always point to every single issue they can - please don't let that cast a shadow on the issues themselves if you can.
They are not teams. They are not your team. Stop thinking about them like that. They are parties, representative, politicians. The team they are supposed be on is your team, the citizens of the nation they represent - red or blue, same team, different ideas.
I reject your framing of what the left's response has been. In fact, analyzing the 2016 occupies little of the left's response. We have been tuning policies, and messaging. Did you even notice that we had some primaries recently, in which several well established incumbents lost to challengers with a new message? What more proof could you need that the left is making actual changes instead of excuses? Your "concern" is based on an untrue assumption.
Don't mistake what the media reports for reality, especially not when the media is so polluted with people determined to muddy everything and exacerbate conflict. That's the modern way to distort the political conversation, practiced both by our international adversaries and by the current administration's domestic allies. Modern citizenship requires being alert to it, and resisting rather than magnifying its effects.
Well I hope you are correct, and there certainly are some Democratic candidates (e.g. Beto in Texas) that seem to be adjusting. However, I don't think I would agree that the description "professional liars of the far right" fits the New Yorker.
The funny thing about lies is that they spread. Often, the people who spread them are unaware that they're doing so. Most journalists tend to follow an established narrative, so each fact they report might be true but the sum can still be deeply misleading. The New Yorker fits this mold, but their contribution isn't really even interesting. The more important question is: who made that the dominant narrative when it poorly represents reality, and how? Also, what part do you and I play in the spread of those harmful memes?
A more important question is when will the new yorker and the rest of the media fix itself before it breaks democracy.
Seems like the new yorker's ( and most of the media's ) definition of "breaking democracy" is when people vote for candidates the new yorker doesn't like. So petty and immature.
Where were these stories the last 8 years? When obama used social media to win elections, social media was great. Now social media is the worst thing ever?
I pass by the New Yorker sign nearly everyday. I used to be impressed by it. Now it seems like a blight on manhattan. Hopefully, the new yorker is doing a better job of hiring their fact checker.
This isn't about Trump using social media to win elections. This is about Russia using social media to spread misinformation to influence U.S. elections. No such thing happened 8 years ago.
How do you know it didn't happen before? And also, I found blaming everything on Russia is really funny. I mean, yes, they leaked the info and probably changed the course of the history, but it's not like they made up false information. I don't claim I know everything about the leak, but it sounds like it was mostly factual.
Uhhhhhh, you haven't been paying attention. The "DNC hack" was just one of many intrusions perpetrated by the Russians with the assistance of GOP leadership.
I've been a lifelong democrat and it's obvious that you are trying to justify removing 1st amendment speech by voices YOU say are fake news. Big mistake.
39 comments
[ 201 ms ] story [ 793 ms ] thread“For many years, it was, like, ‘Your LinkedIn thing is going to be crushed, so even though we’re friendly, I don’t want to get too close to you personally, because I’m going to crush you.’ Now, of course, that’s behind us and we’re good friends.”
CNN documented that the Russians pushed propaganda on both sides, once having helped plan a protest and a counter protest at once. Their plan to disrupt democracy is very much helped by echo chambers.
Culturally we seem to be moving increasingly towards echo chambers as we are losing the social skills to be capable of engaging in dialog without immediately collapsing into emotional rants.
Think today's politics are divisive? Look back to the mass social unrest and violence of the entire 20th century (or farther, at all of human history). This is not a new phenomenon, and there's nothing unique about Facebook, the Internet, social media, or technology.
No. Facebook (and web echo chambers in general) are dramatically different. Because the available online population is so much larger than a physical community, narrower and louder echo chambers are possible. Back in the offline days echo chambers were more self-limited and internally more diverse, because the smaller pool of possible members meant too much exclusion would make the group too small to be sustainable. Now, every crazy fringe idea can have a Facebook group of 500 active members egging each other on, and use targeted ads to easily suck in every susceptible person.
It's the uneducated citizenship that is breaking it and this happens when the rich don't want to pay for the education of the poor.
You know, like, good, free, tax-funded public schools.
Facebook has issues, but the idea that it will "break democracy" is absurd, and kind of offensive.
Unfortunately, because we have a system that makes certain Midwest and rust belt votes worth 3-10x more, Clinton lost anyway.
Most of what people have been complaining about actually happened. Russia really did interfere. Facebook turned a blind eye to massive misinformation campaigns on their platform. Facebook also knew about the Cambridge Analytica breach for quite a while before making it public. A lot of the voting and ads for Trump were driven by latent (or not so latent) racism.
It's not Facebook's "fault" that these things are happening any more than it's paper's fault if someone makes a racist poster. However, we can't ask paper to help us protect systems of election and governance that were invented before instant global communication.
Facebook is "just a platform," but we have the unique ability to ask the platform for help ensuring against abuse. I believe we must try to do that.
Trump received 304 votes compared to Clinton’s 227.
People don’t vote for a president, they vote to direct whole their state votes. Each state vote is worth the same with larger states having more of them. This is the system we’ve had for 240 years.
I think you know all of this.
No, they didn't. The right and correct way to count votes isn't the method that would've given your side a victory; it's the way that was prescribed by the law as it existed at the time of the election.
> Unfortunately, because we have a system that makes certain Midwest and rust belt votes worth 3-10x more
This is the the result of a very old compromise. Maybe it should be reevaluated, but that's a separate issue.
I agree with the rest of your post.
Agreed. But there is no kind of about it.
The not-so-hidden subtext of the article is “how can Facebook get away with helping only Democrat candidates”
Even if you beleive in the ““theory”” that Trump was helped by Russian ads on Facebook, you’d need to admit about 1/2 were ProClinton or AntiTrump.
I have hopes they’re going to come to their senses. They’re driving away reasonable people.
It's now all about the dark art of "fake news", almost as if, since he was elected illegitimately, none of the reasons he may have been elected matter.
I wonder if we'd even be having this discussion if Trump hadn't been elected. Probably at some level but not to the degree it has been.
This article being a clear example of that.
My point is that your list isn't mutually exclusive (Facebook, interference, racism, bad Democratic candidate), and, anecdotally, every human being I know in person agrees those are all real issues that contributed, and only disagree on degrees, and those disagreements have always been reasonable. What I think is dangerous is broadly dismissing all those issues under the umbrella of "you lost, deal with it." Irrational blame-seekers will always point to every single issue they can - please don't let that cast a shadow on the issues themselves if you can.
Don't mistake what the media reports for reality, especially not when the media is so polluted with people determined to muddy everything and exacerbate conflict. That's the modern way to distort the political conversation, practiced both by our international adversaries and by the current administration's domestic allies. Modern citizenship requires being alert to it, and resisting rather than magnifying its effects.
Seems like the new yorker's ( and most of the media's ) definition of "breaking democracy" is when people vote for candidates the new yorker doesn't like. So petty and immature.
Where were these stories the last 8 years? When obama used social media to win elections, social media was great. Now social media is the worst thing ever?
I pass by the New Yorker sign nearly everyday. I used to be impressed by it. Now it seems like a blight on manhattan. Hopefully, the new yorker is doing a better job of hiring their fact checker.
Uhhhhhh, you haven't been paying attention. The "DNC hack" was just one of many intrusions perpetrated by the Russians with the assistance of GOP leadership.