How the Trolls Stole Washington
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I grew up in a relatively (in my country) impoverished area, and spent my schooling and adult life in relatively wealthy areas. The lack of understanding between the social groupings in each is unexplainably great, and it pains me greatly to see the non-representation that the working class get in media.
But yes 4chan trolls won the election. Fuck me. The media seems to collectively not have a clue.
If I trusted my country's media then I'd think that the main issues affecting poorer demographics are drug addiction, homelessness, joblessness due to inaccessibility of education...i.e. lots of things you can fix by electing the correct people and increasing funding.
These are issues, but they're tiny minority issues which somehow remain de rigueur for the media to talk about. In the actual communities the issues are more predominant and less politically correct to talk about, such as tensions between indigenous populations and immigrants, single parenthood, joblessness due to cheaper labour from emerging economies, joblessness due to the facilitation of employer abuses by government through zero hour contracts, gang violence in-part due to drug usage by wealthier classes, and so on.
I don't read American newspapers but I'm guessing that you'll see a lot of the former and none of the latter in the Times.
One issue in the US is that the poor are themselves divided by race.
Do you honestly believe that Trump and his supporters are representing the "working class"?
> But yes 4chan trolls won the election.
That's not the article's argument. It's that rhetorical tricks used by trolls helped win the election.
Yes, of course. This is tautological. Do Trump's supporters, who are largely working class, represent the working class...yes.
Several states that haven't voted Republican in 30 years voted for him en-masse because of their lack of representation elsewhere. If you're asking if Trump will represent the working class in the future, then my answer is that I don't know, but in his short time he's done what he promised.
If you think that states switched from Democrat to Republican because of trolls then, I'd also suggest that you're out of touch with certain demographics.
Or maybe not. But let's see how the next few years go.
I'm not arguing, by the way, that any other politicians would have represented them better.
This isn't true, most of his voters are richer than Hillary voters by a long shot.
Oh right OK, yeah that did it. If I am the only person on HN that hasn't heard of Zoe Quinn, I'll humbly eat crow. If the author thinks that "internet trolling didn't boil over until 2014" we must have been using different interwebz, which is _not_ the one I've been using for the past 25 years.
People are also generally more and more disgusted with jobs that keep getting sent overseas. Couple that with the large group of the left that has been protesting everything and calling all who oppose as racist, and well Trump started looking pretty good.
I would consider Joseph McCarthy an ur-troll by this account, and so no, none of this is new. And one of his chief accomplices was Richard Nixon, so the troll to White House route has even been previously traveled.
Maybe it was his critics who were trolling ;)
> In the 1980s, Barsky’s most interesting potential recruits were radical rightwing ideologues; here, Soviet agents would pose as activists from the radical right. “There was one individual I reported on who I’m convinced would have fallen for that, because he was so strongly rightwing,” he says. But Barsky doesn’t know if any of them proved useful sources for the KGB; it was operational procedure that the agent who did the profiling and the agent who tried to recruit them were different people. He continued to send the profiles; the rest remained a mystery.
Time will tell.