Google’s top news link for ‘final election results’ is a fake news site

(For example, critical thinking has helped me to date — I believe — because it's not worth going after me as you only need 50% of the population to win an election. Just as it isn't worth trying to write a Nigerian scam email that's good enough to get me because there is plenty of lower-hanging fruit.)

Critical thinking is not a shield against your own bias.

In my opinion, we aren't there yet since there are huge disparities between education quality across the public school system. One solution (IMO) is to standardize funding; today school districts rely on local funding which can result in tremendous funding disparities (and by extension, disparities in education quality).

Pretending that propaganda and information warfare only affect dumb people is dangerous thinking.

Let's say identical articles get published in Huffington Post and Breitbart (since most journalism is reposting AP/Reuters/Youtube/Imgur/Twitter with a h/t at the end anyway, its not unbelievable.)

The HP article gets shared by the left-bubble and spreads rapidly. Now if The left-internet catches wind of a controversial Breitbart article, they attack. In left-internet the Breitbart article will perish, the HP, flourish.

Because there are 55 hundred million versions of the same article posted across thousands of sources, there are always variants of each story that exhibit each behavior in each community.

Story time...

The very first class I took in college was called Information Fluency, back in 2002. Among other things, it taught HTML and CSS (which I already knew) and then the professor did something really interesting for the capstone project, which was to have everyone create a fake website containing some big news and host it on its own domain (which weren't so easy to get back then). The more real-looking you made it, the higher your score. So you quickly learned to pay attention to little things such as copyright notices in footers, professional-looking logos, professional-sounding domain names, static pages for stuff like "organization history" and whatnot.

The best part though? As extra credit, the teacher sent everyone a list of ten links, which were either the fake websites created by other students, or real websites. If you were able to correctly distinguish the fake ones from the real ones, you earned the extra credit! So your overall score was a function of how well you fooled others, and how likely you yourself were to be fooled. :)

I got the highest score in that class. Mine was a website belonging to some fake space agency called Interstellar Space Sciences, and it was reporting on its front page that scientists had found trace of alien life on Mars. The story had fake citations from real people working at real organizations, as well as high-quality photos of what looked like the Martian landscape (actually Death Valley in California that I applied a reddish color filter to) and diagrams of organic molecules. I also had a "Contact Us" page where I listed my phone number, which several people actually called! For a period of three weeks I just answered all calls with, "Good afternoon, Interstellar Space Sciences, how may I direct your call?" and everyone fell for it, including some of my actual friends...

Anyway, I think my experiences in that class turned me into a super skeptic, and from then on I started to take all incoming information with a grain of salt, especially if it is reported in the news.

Only in some cases: consider how much money is spent on political advertising, and then all of the second-order work funding think-tanks, newspapers, magazines, TV networks, etc. to promote a particular viewpoint. I wouldn't classify Reason as a fake news source but they're an example of what that might look like. Here are their IRS filings from 2015 showing ~90% of their operating income coming from donations:

https://www.reason.org/files/2015-reason_990.pdf

What happens if one or two of their major donors decides this isn't the most effective way to support their viewpoint and they'd get more return at the polls by setting up a less ethical site?

How many Google Ads could you buy for $9M/year, and how quickly would that translate into organic page-rank? Now consider that Presidential campaign spending has been in the billion-plus range for awhile and ask how many activist donors would be totally comfortable dropping tens of millions for a couple of years to run a fake site if they thought it'd be more effective than a few more TV ads.

But the atlantic article itself reads like a propoganda.

There are ethnic russians who speak russian living as the majority group in a region called novorussia less than 150 years ago. None of that is false. Why not conduct a plebiscite there? These people will shit on India for kashmir or Israel for Palestine, but will turn a blind eye towards other areas. Propoganda it is too.

The example that really opened my eyes was the reporting in the NYT running up to the Iraq war, during which they falsely reported Saddam Hussain had large stockpiles of WMDs.

I was told several times that Snopes is a liberal/democrat operative and has been proven to be wrong in the past. When requested, I was never provided with cases where Snopes was has been wrong. I was also told that PolitiFact.com was started and run by the Clinton campaign.

These "news" articles got even worse with the Podesta emails. It's easy for the blatantly false alt-right sites like InfoWars to make up stories and then these click-farming sites run those stories with even more sensational headlines. This was the case I saw with the "Spirit cooking" and claims that the Clinton camp was really a pedophile ring (using an email chain referencing kids in a swimming pool as "entertainment" as proof. In context, the emailer was someone speaking of bringing their own 3 kids to the party)

I don't know if these people were tricked, or if they were willfully ignorant because these "news" stories mad them feel justified in their preexisting hatred of all things democrat, liberal, and Clinton.

Edit: words

This doesn't apply to all older people, of course. But on aggregate, I would agree with you.

Chesterton's fence strikes again.[0]

The electoral college addresses a real issue, and "the electoral college is a ridiculous system" is not an argument for removing/replacing it.

If you want to see the electoral college replaced or reformed, you need to at least demonstrate that you understand why it exists in the first place.

Hint: it's not because they weren't aware of the simpler "winner takes all" approach with the popular vote.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

The more the Electoral College diverges from the popular vote, the better case you can make for changing the system. And on the other side, if somehow the counts were wrong and the popular vote did favor Trump, that would greatly undermine the argument for reform.

  > when in fact, more people wanted the other person

And Trump does have a mandate. The system is at it is - it has been like that since the very beginning of this country. I may not agree personally, but he won, and I really don't see any positive point in attempts that try to reinterpret the result. Remember, some day the roles may be switched.

To me, it seems that the people that should be pissed are the ones in swing states, since the winner-take-all nature of the EC means half of those states are completely un-represented.

Can someone point me out as why Americans differentiate republic from direct democracy? I reckon than in most of the world these words don't mean opposites. Republic means just "not a monarchy/aristocracy" where I live, and I reckon in most of the world.

(This is a genuine question, maybe there is a reason for the American usage of the term)

A direct democracy is one where voters vote directly on issues rather than representatives who make decisions on issues; basically no one thinks the US is like this, though many individual states in the US incorporate some degree of direct democracy via initiative and referendum.

I think it would be more accurate than your formulation to say "We are a federal republic with a very loose approximation of representative democracy, but most people think we are, or at least should be, a representative democracy (which would still be a federal republic, but also a democratic republic.)"

Well, as much as is possible given the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 24th Amendments. But they also need to understand that the Electoral College was designed to reward disenfranchisement (which it still does) and protect slavery (which, at least in formal terms, it no longer does.)

The electoral college was indeed intended to ensure representation for all of the states, but it is definitely not working the way it was originally designed.

The original design assumed that the voters would vote for electors by name (i.e. the electors' names would be on the ballot, not the candidates' names), and the chosen electors would exercise independent judgment and vote for the candidate they thought would be the best president. We know this is the original intention, because the people who designed the electoral college wrote about this at length.

When some states started putting the names of the presidential candidates on the ballots instead of the names of the electors, James Madison and the other people who designed the electoral college were very unhappy about it. They felt so strongly about it that they proposed amending the constitution to require that ballots contain the electors' names rather than the candidates' names.

When electors are bound to vote for a certain candidate, it's clear that the electoral college is not working as it was originally designed.

If the elecrotates choose Trump, the electoral college will have failed its final test.

source: run a legitimate news site built on Wordpress.

http://www.infowars.com/

http://usdefensewatch.com/

http://therealstrategy.com/

http://www.neonnettle.com/

Of course, people who don't want to hear the truth -- most Trump supporters, in my experience -- will deny reality or will try to undermine it in non-truthful ways.

As a matter of fact, there are several other honest fact-checking sites besides Politifact. It would be somewhat interesting if these disagreed with Politifact's judgments, but they don't.

In other words, serious reporting (as opposed to opinion pieces) treated lies as though they were truths. This could only be considered harmful.

There has been quite a lot of discussion around this. See, for example:

The Death of 'He Said, She Said' Journalism http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/the-deat...

Big lie, little lie, and the media’s role in telling the difference http://www.cjr.org/criticism/trump_birtherism_lie_media.php

It’s Not Too Late for the Media to Fix Its Election Coverage: A final plea for sanity in how we report on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. https://newrepublic.com/article/136848/its-not-late-media-fi...

Sadly, it's even worse than it sounds, because now even the alt-right websites can't tell the truth. For an interesting short piece about this, see the final section of "Donald Trump broke the conservative media" (1). Quote:

One of the chief problems, Sykes (2) said, was that it had become impossible to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past several decades, the conservative news media had "basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers."

"There's nobody," he lamented. "Let's say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it's a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, 'By the way, you know it's false.' And they'll say, 'Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.' Or they'll say, 'I saw it on a Facebook page.' And I'll say, 'The New York Times did a fact check.' And they'll say, 'Oh, that's The New York Times. That's bulls---.' There's nobody — you can't go to anybody and say, 'Look, here are the facts.'"

"And I have to say that's one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there's no way to break through it," Sykes continued. "And I swim upstream because if I don't say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they'll ask what's wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true."

(1) http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-drudg...

Edit/insert:

(2) "Charlie Sykes, a popular conservative talk show host in Wisconsin"

Which is moot point until someone can scientifically prove the person who's calculations showed Hillary losing the popular vote are indeed inaccurate, correct?

And that's what I am confused about. Isn't google suppose to the show the most popular result based on a set of criteria?