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Comment by thisisdallas | Hacker News Reader

I'll get down voted but it doesn't really matter. The sentiment changed because of identity politics. As soon as Trump mentioned he was against the tpp places like hn and reddit suddenly became very quiet in their opposition to it.

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Once all the candidates came out against it, it became clear it was not going anywhere anytime soon. So why bother posting about something that is not going to happen.

I don't think identity politics had anything to do with it. Bernie Sanders was against the TPP as much as Trump was, for many of the same reasons.

You know, it would make a really interesting study to follow up on theories (in the scientific sense) like this. The HN data is available, isn't it?

I agree it would be interesting!

This certainly isn't scientific at all but a quick search for tpp (all time popularity) shows the first page of results as posts that primarily took place more than a year ago. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tpp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...

Trump mentioned he was opposed to the tpp almost exactly one year ago today.

If we search the popular 'tpp' posts from December 1st 2015 to today, we get results that show posts that are critical of the tpp but over half of the first page of results have less than 100 upvotes. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tpp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...

Like I said, not scientific but kind of interesting I guess?

Cool. Nice quick hack! How would you go about tying in identity politics?

My theory is that, and this totally based on opinion, most people don't want to show support for a specific idea or policy of the "enemy" politician out of fear from being persecuted by those who are on their same team. "I might agree with Trump on the tpp but I will certainly never say I agree with Trump about anything."

Working with what you've described, how would you go about supporting that with HN data? Selfish reason for asking: I've been thinking about doing something like this, but haven't yet spent much time thinking about it. :)

I'd be interested to know if it was the same people speaking on both occasions though, because it is entirely possible that different sentiments being expressed was a result of different people expressing sentiment, rather than the same people changing their sentiment.

In other words, the same people who disliked TPP before could dislike it today, but not be commenting in the threads talking about Trump's opposition to it and new people who didn't comment on it before could be expressing their opinion formed by recent events (or even harbored from before).

I definitely think an in depth study on internet group think would be interesting, I just think that examining closer to see who composes the group and how it's thinking is an important aspect of that study.

It could also be that the ones who are against something are always more vocal.

It could be but it's not. The same phenomena happened with Facebook. Ordinarily Facebook is a pariah among enlightened and virtuous Internet folk; compromising privacy and marketing their users for ad revenue, etc. But then someone accused Facebook of grooming their news feed to suppress stories that might validate right wing/conservative/republican/whatever views and Shazam! I've never seen so many corporate sovereignty advocates lecturing the world about how Facebook is free to do with its news feed whatever it wishes, imbued with the right of free speech, and how dare anyone in Congress have the temerity to mention the I word. How chilling!

Tesla is another great example. Ordinarily, self serving research by a corporation is dismissed as junk science or "misinformation." But let Tesla publish survey results [1] to argue their end of a regulatory dispute and that view ricochets around the progressive echo chamber as though a voice from the sky had spoken The Word, Tesla of course being the golden boy of anti-fossil fuel group thinkers.

The sudden concern for the consequences of stopping these big trade deals is nothing more than partisanship. Pretend otherwise if you wish, but it's dead either way and the world is better for it. Thank you President Elect Trump.

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/11/tesla-autopilot-germany/

Both Clinton and Sanders were against the TPP?

Clinton's opposition was an election season aberration. Sanders, being an actual leftist and mostly uninterested in the concerns of multinationals, opposed it from the start, as he did NAFTA and others.

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