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Comment by anjc | Hacker News Reader

Wow this is idiotic. How out of touch with the economy, society, and the world do you have to be, and how sheltered a life do you have to have, to think that "trolls" were a significant factor in that election. Get off of Reddit and Facebook and leave your gentrified neighbourhood for 5 minutes.

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.

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I think it depends on which media you choose. I've been aware of most of the working class issues raised during the past campaign season, and for many years prior, from reading the New York Times, a liberal establishment paper.

I'd suggest that if a person is not from the areas affected then they possibly aren't getting an accurate grasp on the reality via media.

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.

I'll have to consider your thoughts. I'm personally aware of many of those issues, but can't honestly remember where I learned about them.

One issue in the US is that the poor are themselves divided by race.

Yep. That's not as much of an occurrence in my country as it is in the US, but in cases where it is, it's still clear that politicians are completely out of touch with the needs of immigrant communities.

> it pains me greatly to see the non-representation that the working class get in media.

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.

> Do you honestly believe that Trump and his supporters are representing the "working class"?

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.

Yes. By "supporters", I meant funders, allies, etc. Not voters. Maybe they just got trolled.

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.

>>Do Trump's supporters, who are largely working class, represent the working class...yes

This isn't true, most of his voters are richer than Hillary voters by a long shot.

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