Comment by nocoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nocoder | Hacker News Reader

For how long will Americans blame FB for the rise of Trump? One he is democratically elected and two Americans have voted for him. Now dont argue about vote share, it does not matter as far as the way American electoral system works, its like talking about possession share in soccer when the winner is decided based on goals scored. The whole thing about Russia, the fact is the ground conditions & discontent amongst large population of Americans existed, it may have been fanned by Russia but it could have been simply done by any political party using ads, there is nothing ground breaking about it except the use of Russian money perhaps, most of it is marketing. Instead of acknowledging & working towards a more united society, (the U in USA), most media is just fanning further divisions by trying to sensationalize & scandalize every single thing. If so many of your fellow countrymen feel disenchanted enough to vote for a reality tv star, then the society needs deeper introspection. Coming to interference in election, America has done this & destroyed many countries, there is nothing scandalous if it is happening to USA. This is just another tactic employed by countries to get some benefits for themselves. IT might be morally incorrect, but just because it has probably happened to US does not make it something to scream about especially when US has done this probably the most.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention

For a democracy to give good results, voters need to work from good information.

Even in the absence of intentional manipulation, Facebook is hyper-efficient at spreading bad information.

Now America's adversaries have weaponized this, and are actively pushing sophisticated and targeted disinformation through Facebook.

Zuckerberg's malign naïveté allowed this to get bigger, faster than he could manage. It's a monster that he doesn't know how to control.

Until Americans understand how thoroughly they've been fucked, and until Facebook reckons with their outsized role in this, it's really important to keep beating this drum.

Zuckerberg himself is only gradually coming to terms with it.

Here's his "preposterous defence" eviscerated -> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/opinion/mark-zuckerberg-f...

People don’t vote based on facts. They vote based on identity and feelings. Democracy for Realists has an explanation at length.

As an American, I completely agree. So many of my compatriots are full of optimism, bravado, or even a sense of underserved privilege - all over the spectrum they're the same manifestation of the idea that we're "better" than other nations - but almost a year later we're still wallowing around in these melodramatics over what happened. The undeniable fact of the matter is that 42% of eligible voters did not cast a ballot last year. And presidential elections are our highest turnout years. People are getting angry about Facebook? Gimme a break.

Conflating events isn't helpful. The following are independent of each other, so it's illogical to say something like "Trump won with populist support, therefore Facebook did not have an impact."

- The Trump campaign mobilized sufficient support to be elected.

- The Trump campaign demobilized Clinton's support.

- This was the first "social media at critical mass" election.

- Voter turnout was low, as usual in the US.

- Conservative organizations appear to have harnessed targeted ads on social media more effectively than liberals.

- Political and apolitical "news" businesses realized there was money to be made in sensationalist, false stories.

- Foreign governments realized there were no prohibitions on using these levers to affect US (and other) elections.

- Facebook appears to have been completely ignorant at the time of this impact. (Likely because, as the Atlantic article points out, their KPIs were truth-agnostic)

Is "X won Trump the election?" unproductive? Yes, in the sense that it precludes further examination and the fact that there were many factors.

But that doesn't mean that X isn't important in its own right and shouldn't be examined.

A move from a limited oligarchy of old guard news sources to an explosion of anonymous, high-sharing-velocity, profit-driven sources is absolutely going to have an effect on democracy. And is important for that reason alone.

I don't agree with much of your argument.*

But much of the media is attacking Facebook for the same reason you say they shouldn't: as a way of "acknowledging & working towards a more united society." The fact that a foreign power intervened in our election, likely decisively, should be a cause for all Americans to unite in common defense.

Individual members of the media are also attacking Facebook because these attacks are likely to be quite productive and to lead to real changes. The government has done nothing about the election intervention, and without changes Russia will probably intervene more significantly in the next election. Facebook can make real changes and is susceptible to popular pressure.

* (The US shouldn't complain about foreign electoral interventions because it has intervened itself? I mean, the US has launched coups... Do you seriously think "there is nothing scandalous" about a country being destroyed? It shouldn't defend itself? This is not a soccer game.)

I am not blaming FB for Trump (also, I am not American) but I do think that there is some indication that social media including Facebook has contributed to a more polarized climate which I think is what allowed someone like Trump to get elected in the first place.

> For how long will Americans blame FB for the rise of Trump?

For some Americans (about 15%-20%) and for all of the liberal media, a minimum of three more years. Trump's election was the first time social media worked dramatically against their interests. In 2008 and 2012, the Democrats had an advantage in that their voting base were early adopters of social media and various online strategies for organizing both money and voters. That use and understanding gap has almost entirely been closed.

For how long will Americans blame FB for the rise of Trump?

The subject of the article is accurately summarized by the headline, and this isn't it.

The information systems that people use to process news have been rerouted through Facebook, and in the process, mostly broken and hidden from view ... The truth is that while many reporters knew some things that were going on on Facebook, no one knew everything that was going on on Facebook, not even Facebook.

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