How We Broke Democracy
medium.com
medium.com
I try to do what they recommend and it's tough to listen to both sides. They start with the basis you're already supporting them so they skip the "foundation" of their argument and the content generally is lies and condescension for the other (to be clear, I'm talking about both sides).
Editors must make a selection of which facts are relevant and interesting enough to make it into... whatever it is they're editing. When that's political news, that selection bias becomes more important. And in today's age, it can be so extreme that both sides are operating with inconsistent perspectives. Not because someone is lying or misleading.
/Then you add lying and misleading and the whole thing is a dumpster fire.
These outlets more and more rely on rhetoric, opinions, and emotions instead of facts.
I think part of it is that incentives are misaligned. I didn't want to throw shade on one side, but the Les Moonves quote, "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." I think in addition to a news businesses focusing on being the best and financially successful, there's focus in politics where the only goal for each side is on winning instead of being right or living up to some ideals.
I found this podcast particularly interesting (though maybe not 100% correct), but it discusses interesting urban/rural social and cultural boundaries. And I think it's fairly perceptive in the observation that completely unrelated political issues are bound together simply because they happened to fall on different sides of that cultural divide. I think that divide had formed long before the internet and certainly social media.
It was also recorded just before the election which additionally makes for some prophetic elements.
Cracked Podcast #148 http://www.earwolf.com/episode/trump-country/
Sam Biddle wrote an article[1] in The Intercept recently where he uses a phrase that would be a great name for this new tech:"Internet-Augmented Ignorance"
The clickbait phenomenon appears to be a much bigger problem today than it did a week ago. A week ago, I thought of it as a mere annoyance. Now I fear it is an existential threat – especially in light of Zuckerberg's take:
"I think the idea that fake news on Facebook—of which it’s a very small amount of the content—influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea."
[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/10/facebook-im-begging-you-...
The viral posts get to spread organically, at a rate through the social graph equal to the appeal chance.
However, to refute it, you must first research the response with sufficient veracity / references. That is probably the original 10x.
But then you must move the refutation, which seems to have a much reduced virality factor, to the necessary places the viral bullshit spread.
That would require constant searches of the graph. If the graph is "secured", then locating the instances/replications of the viral bullshit could be practically impossible.
Even if you had access, the viral bullshit can replicate, since the very thing that makes it viral makes it memorable, and you'd need to do constant sweeps of the social graph to repress it.
Well, leave it to the experts.
If the problem were merely that people selectively shared thoughtful but biased articles within their own information bubble, the problem would not be so severe.
The clickbait problem, in contrast, is that people share – within milliseconds - articles that are designed merely to siphon money from that dopamine hit, with no good-faith effort to even make any sense whatsoever.
Trump winning while losing the popular vote is the system working as intended, but we can definitely debate whether those intentions were good and if the reasons for the system still apply today. The political situation is very different now from when the electoral college was implemented. As it stands, it's entirely up to the states to change the laws binding their electors to the state popular vote. Eleven have already signed on to National Popular Vote Interstate Compact which would bind their electors to the national popular vote if enough states sign on.
Exactly, these complaints are based on an unknowable counterfactual, that if the rules of the game were total votes, a Trump campaign based on them wouldn't have won. All we know is that if you change the rules of the game after it's been played, Hillary "won".
Plus states generally don't count absentee ballots unless they could change election results (which wouldn't necessarily be for the presidential race), so we're only talking about votes counted, not votes cast. And absentee ballots strongly break Republican, like 2/3rds to 1/3rd from one source I just read.
In case it isn't clear, yes, all ballots are counted in every election. Even absentee ballots. The idea that they're not counted is ludicrous.
And whatever that Official Federal Government FAQ might say to, for example, encourage people to vote absentee, it has no bearing on the facts on the ground. The rules of which are, for Presidental elections, the sole prerogative of each state's legislature.
To say a metric we aren't optimising for shows X is not really anything more than a side effect of something else.
"Leftists" aren't saying anything proponents of the other party haven't said when their candidate loses.
The discussion at hand is about the imbalance in our election system as a whole. NOT this election.
There is ample data to suggest control of our government is not decided by the people put the parties. Gerrymandering and voter suppression are very real things. Both sides engage in it, but IMO the evidence suggests one party is "winning" more than the other because of it.
Candidates from outside these parties hardly have a voice thanks to these parties designing the rules around who is included.
That is a serious issue that's not being discussed on the whole.
Your comment is simply perpetuating the notion that things are fine and the other side is butt hurt. I somehow doubt in a world as complex as ours that's the easy answer. Especially when both sides are implicated by data that they're rigging the system.
It's not about a particular candidate for me. It's about a two party duopoly on our politics. If anyone wants to shake up the establishment, breaking that strangle hold is target. Not simply passing a baton to the candidate that appears more anti-establishment only for them to load up on pundits from an established party after the fact.
IMO the news media is only a system. The bigger issue has been here for years. It's our short term mentality when it comes to making decisions. Next quarter versus next year. Next election versus next generation.
This isn't a problem created by Twitter and 24/7 news. This has been going on since well before either existed. They've exacerbated it, but IMO the underlying issues are our deifying our economics. We don't talk about how to help each other directly. We just believe that growing our economy will magically make the world better.
No matter which side a player is on our system at the core right now is against the people. Not just us but our descendants. It's this short term vision of how to solve our problems (which usually means get the stock price up or some similar cold economic metric) and not about what's beneficial outside the bubble that is recent past and recent future.
Why not give the article a shot before insulting "the left"?
The candidate that was selected showed himself during the campaign to be entirely unmoored from factual reality or consistency, and somehow he paid no political consequences for that.
This is important for reasons above & beyond whether one's own candidate won or lost.
I don't like all this recent talk about how Comey sunk Clinton's candidacy or some right wing FBI agent conspiracy did her in. She owns all her scandals, it's her job to defend and sell her brand.
I took it she thought the presidency was a foregone conclusion and she felt should could let the email thing fester for months with evolving excuses without taking any serious damage. The unanswered drip-drip Wikileaks revelations with DNC bag ladies and Media shills dropping like flies all around her didn't help either.
I didn't have a dog in the fight, I didn't vote for either Clinton nor Trump. Both the candidates were super negative. I believe if the Democrats put up someone with a modicum of positive energy (Bernie, perhaps?) Trump would not have been elected.
All the scandals. Too uncharismatic and un-empathetic to really resonate with voters. (It would not be a stretch to compare her to Kerry in this category.) She was completely an establishment candidate at a time of great anti-establishment sentiment. And the DNC put her on the express path to the nomination, which turned off a big chunk of her own party, and thereby (I strongly suspect) reduced turnout.
With all those flaws, it's a measure of Trump's weakness that Hillary came as close as she did...
just saying that this is direct evidence against the article's conclusions.
Your observation that lively debate exists somewhere on Reddit is valid; no doubt about that.
It's a stretch to suggest that this is the common case for Reddit users, though.