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Comment by mwill | Hacker News Reader

I can only see this as furthering the echo chamber that caused many to be so blindsided by Trumps victory.

I would like to see specifically why these people were suspended. If they're engaged in harassment obviously the suspension should hold up. If it really is just mass reporting for political speech (I've had friends msging 'targets' for reporting purely for them admitting to voting for Trump), I can only see it as a bad trend.

These people don't go away just because you ban them from your favourite sites. They just disappear from your own view, and go away to a more insular community, more of an echo chamber, where they become more radical.

View on HN

Agree, very disturbing trend and it only increases the animosity between groups.

The trending method of improving diversity and inclusivity is through exclusivity. This will not work.

People and groups who don't talk to each other grow further apart and trust each other less.

> The trending method of improving diversity and inclusivity is through exclusivity.

We should remember the source of this article, the BBC, said not so long ago: Whites Need Not Apply.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/03/bbc-criticised-by...

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/695312/BBC-seeking-research...

I'm amused that several people downvoted that true, relevant, and documented comment.

Trying to control the information?

True. People flocked to Twitter to hear general opinion, which the press didn't provide. That is changing.

They have also been controlling the trending #hashtags; trying to channel only certain type of discussion.

What happens if a group like the Koch brothers decides to buy Twitter and ban the other side of the spectrum and control hashtags in a different manner. It's a slippery slope

What do you do about Twitter and Facebook becoming the propaganda arm of the alt-right?

There's no simple solution here. Part of the Alt-Right platform, as I have it, is that the media (be it news or social media) is corrupt and bent on silencing them. Suspending their accounts would only reinforce that belief.

I would also hope that we can come up with a solution that doesn't involve hindering others's ability to communicate. Even if it is the simplest and most effective tactic, it seems like that's just fighting the symptoms rather than the disease.

From what I see in my feed, it seems 100% of "progressives" have doubled down on their hyperbolic, established, in-group rhetoric. I followed everyone that I follow because they are programmers, not because they are "progressives". But from looking at my feed, one would think that I deliberately set out to create a radical SJW echo chamber for myself.

Exactly the same here. You wrote my thoughts perfectly.

It's sad actually.

I looked at a list of OSS project leaders and other programmers recently and was surprised at the popularity of the hammer and sickle symbol in their bios.

Upside is that I now know who not to listen to when the next tech drama pops up.

Do you literally mean hammer and sickle? Or is that a literary device?

Literally the unicode character for hammer and sickle (U+262D)

Wow. Do you have references?

Well mine will now. Thanks for showing this to me.

I can't blame you for wanting to feel the same rush from promoting cruel radical ideologies with a postironic wink that the aforementioned alt-right leaders feel, so... good luck.

> From what I see in my feed, it seems 100% of "progressives" have doubled down on their hyperbolic, established, in-group rhetoric

Then that's a problem with your filter bubble.

> I followed everyone that I follow because they are programmers, not because they are "progressives".

Which is why your view of progressives produced by that is distorted. Programmers who happen to be progressives aren't representative of progressives as a whole (they aren't representative of the broader group along class/income, education, race/ethnicity, or gender lines, among others, and several of those do correlate with preferred approaches.)

Who is representative of progressives as a whole?

Other than a sufficiently large randomly-selected sample, no such group is particularly likely to be.

But these alt-right figureheads aren't your average trump voters. They actually are racist and nasty people and we shouldn't group them together with other conservative/right/trump voters.

I'm not sure why the above is down-voted. There's a litany of evidence to suggest that this is actually true.

Such heavy claims require evidence. Also, it is painting one group as a whole, which reminds me of ...

"reminds me of" != "is".

I don't think it's painting one group as a whole at all. No one is suggesting that all or most Trump supporters are racist. Only that many alt-right figure heads are.

It's not a heavy claim. With Steve Bannon being appointed to the upcoming White House staff, there's been a parade of examples illustrating the blatant racism of alt-right figureheads.

While I appreciate the sentiment that Democrats lost the election by painting much of the population (uncritically) in very broad unflattering strokes, I don't really think the trend of people saying "Well you just can't talk about a group of people as a whole" is going to last. If you're unwilling to discuss groups of people as a single entity, the entire field of social science makes little sense.

I think maybe that we've lost sight of the fact that any time we talk about a group of people, we're really implicitly having a statistical discussion.

"No one is suggesting that all or most Trump supporters are racist."

I have seen that claim hundreds of times in the past few days.

There's a difference between being intentionally and accidentally racist. That is often dropped in conversation, which is why you see different sides disagreeing on that.

In this specific thread? I think context is relevant here.

> With Steve Bannon being appointed to the upcoming White House staff, there's been a parade of examples illustrating the blatant racism of alt-right figureheads.

I've looked at all the articles claiming that Bannon is "bad" (they use different words, of course), and I'm completely unconvinced. Seems like more of the "all Trump supporters are racist" meme.

The last year of news has pushed me more than ever to read/listen to primary sources. Things have become so distorted left or right, that it seems like the responsible thing to do.

Regarding the attacks towards Steve Bannon, I agree. They are only using examples of what other people who don't like him have said. Here is a great speech and Q+A he gave regarding Judeo-Christian values at the highly respected Dignitatis Humanae Institute [0]. Having listened to this speech amongst others, alongside his writings I can only conclude that what is being pushed are simply smears. Breitbart has taken so much power and money away from the mainstream publications, it is in their interests to take him down.

[0] https://soundcloud.com/buzzfeednews/steve-bannon-at-dhi#c=16...

edit: If anyone would like to dispute my opinion, please for good discussion provide primary sources that originate directly from Steven Bannon.

edit edit: please take a look at the Ask HN I have posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12967873

Replying just to post the text of that speech you linked (since the audio is kind of bad), which I also stumbled on the other day in trying to figure this guy out.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-banno...

> No one is suggesting that all or most Trump supporters are racist.

"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

- Hillary Clinton, Sep 2016

Not all of them. They’re people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Many Democrats, myself included thought that particular statement was unnecessarily incendiary. Though, in the bit of text that you quoted, I was mostly referring to the context of this thread. I don't think that there's any doubt that much of the liberal media has broadly painted all Trump supporters as being racists, bigots and xenophobes.

I saw a lot of people on my Twitter feed at the time arguing that actually, half was an understatement and that Clinton should never have backed down on this.

Half is an exaggeration, but they do seem a lot more common among Trump supporters than among Clinton, Sanders, Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Bush, and Kasich supporters.

Spend a while in /r/the_donald.

People who frequent that subreddit do not even amount to 0.00001% of the Trump electorate.

So? The same can be said for people who frequent Clinton, Sanders, Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Bush, and Kasich forums, but none of those get anywhere near the percentage of racist and similar posts and comments as does /r/the_donald.

So you are projecting opinions of 0.0001% of Trump supporters (or trolls, who knows) to 60M+ people who voted for him? I see a bright career at WaPo or NYT for you :-)

> So you are projecting opinions of 0.0001% of Trump supporters (or trolls, who knows) to 60M+ people who voted for him?

1. No, I'm looking at differences in properties of samples drawn from different populations to estimate differences in those populations. Trump-related online forums have a higher fraction of racists than Clinton, Sanders, Cruz, Rubio, Bush, and Kasich forums do.

If Trump supporters in general had the same level of racism as supporters of those other candidates, then we would expect Trump forums to show about the same level of racism as the forums of those other candidates.

2. You seem to think the size of a sample as a percentage of the population is important. It is not. For large populations it is the absolute number of people in the sample that is important, not the percentage of the population.

I am making the assumption that supporters of various candidates are all about equally likely to decide to post on their candidate's forums. It is possible that there is something about Trump supporters that makes racist Trump supporters more prone to make racist forum posts.

That is what you should be focusing on to criticize my inferences about Trump supporters, rather than basing it on your inadequate understanding of elementary probability and how it applies to determining the sample size needed to make reasonably inferences about a population from a sample.

> I see a bright career at WaPo or NYT for you :-)

Have an upvote. I like it when people who are wrong are at least feisty about it.

The article says

"The social network has not given an explanation for its actions."

Banning is fine, but it would be nice if they can actually say in writing, citing reasons and evidence, why they banned them (even if lots of evidence exists elsewhere).

Banning without any explanation isn't of any use to anyone

In the US, the Net Neutrality position describes internet access as a utility, not a luxury. Further the UN declares it a Human Right. If either/both of those positions hold, then the gatekeepers - Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc - suppressing any view or blocking access to any group could be a violation of human rights.

I think that will have to be settled in court, but it will get messy for those companies.

Nobody is being banned from the internet. They are merely being banned by a privately owned American website. Businesses in America have the right to refuse service to any individual provided it is not due to protected status. In America your opinions do not grant you protected status.

ISPs are privately owned American corporations as well. Did you read what you're replying to?

ISPs are considered common carriers, which Net Neutrality addresses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier#Telecommunicati...

I haven't seen this same argument made for websites in particular. If you have good references for that, please do share!

btw, did you create an account just to make this comment? If so, why? It doesn't seem too controversial.

No real reason for the account creation, boredom mostly (I lurk).

And I think that's the point. ISPs are precedent to show that a company being private isn't of itself a good enough reason to let it censor people. Google and Facebook are big enough that I think they should be considered public fora for speech. Hence the term "Gatekeeper" in the OP.

I understand what you're saying, but I know that I'm not qualified to give an informed opinion. So I'd prefer to see a more legitimate source than speculation on HN :)

Just riffing here, but would it be fair to require Amazon to sell any product I want to make available?

If the UN declared your product a Human Right, seems possible.

A litany? Seems an opportunity missed not to produce it rather than resort to mere assertion. If you want to persuade others of your view, that is.

> They actually are racist and nasty people and we shouldn't group them together with other conservative/right/trump voters.

This sounds like stereotyping to me.

alt-right by definition is racist and sexist. that is the definition of the alt-right platform.

Do they call themselves alt-right?

edit: honest question

r/altright has 6,253 subscribers making it one of the smaller subreddits?

They also call themselves deplorables, and I've seen Clinton supporters calling themselves nasty women. I guess I should take that at face value as well?

By their opponents anyway.

then what is the alt-right to its supporters?

Citation?

From Wikipedia: "The alt-right has no formal ideology... 'Alt-right' is a recently coined umbrella term, with no clear criteria of membership yet agreed upon."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right

Would each of the people being banned agree that they've signed on to an admittedly racist and sexist platform? I doubt it.

EDIT: Let me amend "I doubt it" to "I am not sure and haven't done enough research to have an informed opinion." From the article I can't get the full set of people that are known to have been banned or how many of them are professed white nationalists...

The funny thing is that the alt right (at least from the Trump campaign onwards) is based on the idea that if you're not an extremist, you're a "cuck". So, while it isn't a clearly defined ideology, it is a group seeking increasingly more extreme ideologies as time passes.

Twitter's move reduces their platform and reach but increases their cultural cachet — they're becoming the Certified Opposition to all of society's ills.

I'm fairly sure the whole "cuck" insult thing grew out of chan culture. I think it was adopted by /pol/ and then disseminated to the wider alt right community. The funny thing is that while it may have started as an insult to those not extreme enough in their views it evolved (devolved?) into a general purpose insult. Do you like Apple? You're a cuck. How about M$, also a cuck. Google? Yep, cuck. It's basically lost all meaning now.

Even on /b/, which is known for putting up with the absolute lowest quality shitposting on the entire internet, insulting someone as a cuck will now be met with a litany of retorts regarding your "low quality bait". Weird times.

Yes, it's a very convenient label to throw on people who disagree with the orthodoxy regardless of their actual beliefs.

Watch this and let us know who should be getting the ban hammer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXpi3F0E5ro

Dozens of people in my close social circles identify as "alt-right", and none of them are remotely sexist or racist.

I would expect libertarians to be considered "alt right" by the average person.

Do they understand what is happening to the label that they identify with? Do they seek to make a clear statement about what they believe the alt right stands for?

If they let some definition take hold that includes racism, then in the future when they object to saying that the alt right is racist, they aren't standing up for what they believe in anymore, they are providing cover for the racists that stole the label from them.

Racists are not the people who are defining the term - it's the left and the media.

Who changes the meaning is totally irrelevant to it becoming cover. It's not fair to the people that aren't racist, but it's irrelevant to whether they end up providing cover for racists.

One of the suspended accounts belong to Richard Spencer: " an American white nationalist known for promoting white supremacist views" [1]. The others are the same type of character.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_B._Spencer

So?

Are you kidding me? Those who identify as "alt-right" aka Far Right are definitely racist and nasty folks and you can easily see it by reading through their screeds and "jokes."

In the US, they have a right to express themselves, but they do not have a right to be accepted as decent and normal people.

Wrong. Alt-right is a burgeoning group, AND what we are seeing is democrats are trying to strike early to get the "racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe" label associated with them. Basically alt-right is the same as "anonymous" people don't really know who identifies with x,y,z parts of it and it's just frightened democrats who are scared to death to have another group against them that they can't use their standard buzzwords to demean them. E.G. Obama with his "oke-dokes"

Wake me up when Twitter actually suspends demonstrably more toxic groups on the left. Those who have infiltrated and are even holding conferences on evils of "whiteness" and white-hating. So far, Twitter are showing they are biased censoring scared little puritans.

> Those who identify as "alt-right" aka Far Right

While the alt-right is defined by some toxic views (white nationalism, particularly) also found in some parts of the far right, it's a distinct group.

Stereotyping as opposed to it being a conclusion about a person's character based on things they say?

We should have hearings to deal with this problem, and then blacklist anyone who might be a racist sympathizer. If only good old Joe Mccarthy was still around.

You have no idea. I worked with someone who had been radicalized by these groups, and the things they are willing to do to achieve their aims of stamping out people of color and other groups they oppose is nauseating. They are dangerous.

"A cartoon of Pepe the Frog is a commonly used symbol of the alt-right" is the subtitle of the image in the BBC article. Look at it, the drawing innocence is really staggering: I'm wondering what is the link, whether the link is warranted, and whether Twitter used posts of Pepe the Frog to recognize alt-right people. Sounds like a badly AI-generated inference to me.

The particular situation with pepe the frog is a bit more nuanced than news sources let on.

He went from "Feels Bad, Man" comics to being very frequently photoshopped with 3rd reich / swastikas / other neo-nazi logos.

Pepe is an interesting case because it brings up the discrepancy between trolling (messing with others in "bad fun") and actual people who vehemently support and push aggressively hateful messages.

>> very frequently photoshopped with 3rd reich

This really is one of the more ridiculous Clinton campaign talking points that just made them look very out of touch.

Pepe is a common meme template. Of the thousands of Pepes that I have unwillingly seen, none were neo-nazi except those in articles accusing Pepe of being a neo-nazi symbol. However, if you go to a deliberately offensive chan then sure, you will find every meme-template being used offensively.

> Of the thousands of Pepes that I have unwillingly seen, none were neo-nazi except those in articles accusing Pepe of being a neo-nazi symbol.

YMMV. In the circles I browse, they are frequently used, but they were only used to troll. They are certainly used for more aggressive hate in other places, including on Twitter.

This has been my experience too. I've been baffled at the coverage of Pepe as a hate symbol. I had seen it around on the internet for years. To me it was just another meme. The idea of it being a hate symbol came off to me almost as propaganda.

> being very frequently photoshopped with 3rd reich / swastikas / other neo-nazi logos.

Your samples are biased there. If you are already looking at alt-right tweets then obviously you will see more trump- and nazi-related pepes.

If you look anywhere else then pepe is just another highly versatile meme.

/pol/ also shopped MAGA cap onto various anime characters. Momiji inubashiri being particularly popular, probably because she already wears a red hat in her canonical design. Does that mean those anime characters themselves symbolize hate or even conservatism? I think not.

It just means that outside observers are not familiar with memetic mutation.

There's a podcast about how Pepe became a symbol for the alt-right

https://gimletmedia.com/episode/77-the-grand-tapestry-of-pep...

and some article about the original artist trying to put a stop to that

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/its-not-...

This whole Pepe the Frog thing went off the rails of being ridiculous a long, long time ago. It's at the point where it has gone completely meta.

I just listened to the story of Pepe yesterday. https://gimletmedia.com/episode/77-the-grand-tapestry-of-pep...

The artist who created Pepe had nothing to do with the alt-right, it's an internet meme they took by sheer volume, just by using it a lot. Pepe has been around for 10 years, and the use of it as a symbol of white supremacy is 2-3 years old. The artist recently got put on a web page by the Anti Defamation League on a post categorizing Pepe as a hate symbol, next to the Nazi Swastika. The artist called them to try and get it reconsidered and have his name removed, since he had nothing to do with current usage of Pepe. He's now trying to #savepepe.

The current usage of Pepe by the so-called alt-right has sadly but definitely been intended as a symbol of hatred and racism, but I wouldn't assume the discrepancy between what Pepe looks like and what hate groups use it for implies anything about how and why Twitter is blocking these people.

it's an internet meme they took by sheer volume, just by using it a lot.

I think you have your causallity a bit mixed there. They did use it a lot, and then people started lobbing guilt by association at the rest of us that were using it. We had no option but to let Pepe go.

Pepe is a symbol of hate because it wasn't my (or anyone's) hill to die on defending the integrity of a meme from libel by social manipulators.

The reality is sometimes the meaning poured behind a symbol gets changed. The SWASTIKA symbol, originally meant "Good Fortune", existed 5000 years before the Nazis used it.

As someone with a fairly large rare Pepe collection, and who has been responsible for illustrating some extremely rare Pepes, but is in no way sympathetic to the notion of white supremacy, I find this whole Pepe controversy quite annoying. I've even removed the Pepe patch I had on my backpack in fear that someone would misinterpret my politics.

The clearest indiction I had that the media and the Clinton campaign were completely out of touch with reality came after reading this gem of an article on the Clinton campaign website.

https://www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/donald-trump-pepe-the-fr...

Wow, thanks for posting this. I'm not a US citizen so I had not reviewed the candidate sites but I started to suspect things like this had to come from the democratic campaign. I figured soundbites though, not a page on the website. Unbelievable.

You're most welcome.

I usually take my civic duty fairly seriously and try to stay on top of the candidates and their campaigns but this year I found the negativity and vitriol displayed by both sides to be so grating that I was just tuning things out these last few months.

This whole issue with Pepe really drove things home for me, as juvenile as that may sound. I first stumbled upon Pepe years ago when I was even less sure of myself than I am now and I found the image of Pepe staring out of a window as the rain poured down outside [1] to be a perfect illustration of angst.

I'm upset that such an innocent meme could be co-opted by literal Nazis, but to be honest, I don't hold neo Nazis in particularly high regard so I'm not really surprised nor disappointed. On the other hand, I'd like to think a major candidate's campaign would put a bit more thought into the issue than simply asserting that Pepe posters are all Nazis.

I think most decent people would be upset and hurt at being called a racist, sexist, homophobe, or Nazis without a concrete reason. Yes, Pepe is just a stupid cartoon frog and it's not the end of the world that I no longer have him adorn my backpack, but still I feel this is a good example of the effect falsely labelling people with certain isms can have.

Despite being a progressive far to the left of Clinton, this whole affair makes me sympathetic to all the Trump supports, many, perhaps the vast majority of whom are not racist and have legitimate anger at the way Washington has neglected their concerns, who now face being lumped in with actual racists by the media.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/7oHRgrf.jpg

I am very suspicious of people throwing these terms around. Especially because the left uses the terms "racist", "sexist", and "hateful" (etc) to demonize their opponents as opposed to actually addressing certain issues in debate rationally. The willingness to use these terms so freely to shut down debate means I simply don't believe such charges unless I'm shown something that actually meets a reasonable definition. Too many have simply cried wolf here.

I don't know of the people banned (I don't use Twitter) they may actually be all of these things: but I will not use the flimsy, leftist definitions to make that determination. You'd have to give more than your word that they are "racist" and "nasty".

If you don't know of the people banned, read about them. They're true white supremacists. Twitter is under no obligation to be a platform for the KKK as twitter is a private company.

I actually don't care about the people being discussed enough to look them up and I have little interest in substantiating someone else's claim. If you want me to believe someone is a nasty racist, you can tell me why and show me examples. A huge part of the reason that dialogue is breaking down in the U.S. is because these sorts of charges are so easy to fling out there and too many people take it for granted that they're justified. Worse, too often not taking for granted means you get the label yourself. It's no wonder that the polls missed how closely fought a thing the election would be.

My point about some people feeling justified in conceptually stealing the moral condemnation implicit in a term like "racist", while defining that term to mean something very different than what it does mean, stands without regard to whether or not that this is the case with Twitter and these individuals. No one should trust these accusations until the specific case is actually made arguing for the validity of the charge.

OK, I gave in... I looked the first name up that I came across, and what little I looked at and I tend to agree: it looked genuinely racist. By that I mean that it fit a definition of racism that is: decisions or beliefs about individuals using the non-volitional physical category of race/ethnicity of that individual as a factor in their conclusions. That and only that. Everything else, I said in the first two paragraphs stand.

[EDIT FOR ADDITIONAL POINT] Also, Twitter as a private company has no obligation at all to support/allow any position, even if that position: left or right, reasonable or unreasonable, substantiated or unsubstantiated. It's their ball, they can play whatever game they want. My points aren't about Twitter's rights as much as they are about no longer believing "naked" charges or racism, sexism, etc.

> If it really is just mass reporting for political speech

It's not just for political speech. Multiple asian artists drawing cartoon porn, which was properly marked as sensitive content, got their twitter accounts suspended after some offended people mass-reported them.

These were figures representing groups that shout down diverse opinions and quell the free speech of others with noise and abuse. You're not improving understanding and engagement between communities when you allow bullies to silence the meek.

> shout down diverse opinions and quell the free speech of others with noise and abuse

How does that work? Twitter banned them for spamming?

They have those echo chambers already. Some of them are talking about moving to a platform like Gab.

However, most of them realize that the appeal of Twitter is in being able to expose normal people (or 'normies' in their terminology) to far-right ideas.

It's delusional to think that these people want to enter into a conversation or a discourse of any kind - they're using Twitter as a platform to draw attention to their ideas. Twitter, as a commercial business - not a public commons - has no obligation to support that.

I was with you when you started to describe a soundproof echo chanber filled with progressives, which blinded them to public opinion. However you sort of pivoted at the end to an alt-right echo chamber. Perhaps it's a bicameral echo chamber. (insert Westworld comparisons here)

If they are in fact members of the Alt-Right -- which it seems none of them deny -- then I don't see why any further explanation is required.

The Alt-Right is an SPLC-designated hate group. They promote vile hatred against People of Color, women, Muslims, LGBTQ2s, immigrants, etc. I find it disturbing that well educated people could possibly believe a privately-owned company has some duty to serve as a platform for that filth.

and why should anyone care what the splc concludes? serious question.

Huh? You're seriously asking why we should care what experts on the far-right have to say about far-right organizations?

The same "experts" that fell for the Clinton campaign's forced meme that pepe posters were all nazis? That SPLC?

I've seen no evidence of trump supporters being targeted. There is no trend.

edit: wait, is it possible that just because I don't see it happening doesn't mean it isn't? Kind of like police brutality against black lives?

That's because you're not looking for it. Anyone who protests gets muzzled along with the banee.

Banee? Is that "someone who has been banned"?

I didn't followed too much news recently, but two that I heard about, I bet there was/will be more.

http://www.dailywire.com/news/10664/video-trump-voter-dragge...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/anders-vendel...

A couple of others:

http://nypost.com/2016/11/14/teen-girl-says-she-was-brutally...

http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/11/trump_sup...

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/black-lives-ma...

http://patch.com/massachusetts/boston/trump-supporter-allege...

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/subway-rider-a...

There are attacks happening on both sides and it's really pushing us into a scary position as a country. What makes things worse is we have people faking attack stories as well which will likely lead to further violence as people feel the need to retaliate:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/11/1...

Both sides really need to take a step back and realize they're just continuing the divide.

I'm personally against Twitter banning folks unless they're engaging in harassment of other users. It would be nice though if the platforms like Twitter and Facebook more severely punished those harassing others though.

Social media actually enables these people. A lot of them felt empowered when they found out many other people thought like them.

People were blindsided because the majority didn't vote for Trump, but the US's backwards system meant that didn't matter.

In a democratic system where everyone's vote was equal, we would not have President-Elect Trump.

How do you know the result of a completely different kind of election? The candidates would obviously campaign differently in the case you are describing.

Numbers:

Trump : 60,834,437 votes Hillary : 61,782,016 votes

Popular Vote result ( as in your vote counts the same as everyone elses ) President Hillary. US System ( the weight of your vote depends on what state you live in ) President Trump.

If you want to break it down further than that, well there is no reason to analyze anything ever because it's always a completely different situation.

People were blindsided because in any measure people consider fair and democratic, Trump would not be president. Trump was president once Ohio, NC and Florida were called for him. The rest of the country didn't matter except for counting exactly how many electoral college votes he was going to get, but we could have stopped counting votes by about 11pm EST on November 8. For the presidential election, it was just a formality after that.

Your argument is completely fallacious. The contest from the beginning was to get the most electoral votes. The candidates campaigned with that in mind. In many one-sided states like California and Utah, voters voted with that in mind, i.e., Republicans stay home in CA and Democrats stay home in UT. If the election had been about the popular vote, the candidates would have used radically different strategies and the voters in heavy red and blue states would have voted. None of this is controversial.

People forget why the electoral college was created. Every state gets 3 votes for free. More votes added based on population. That's by design, because it props up the small states.

The Constitution intentionally gave disproportionate power to small states to prevent the large states from being able to ignore them entirely. That was a condition that the small states demanded for joining the union.

This election worked exactly as it was intended. The small states preferred Trump, and their constitutionally granted power was sufficient to overule the authority of the larger states.

I agree with you, but I believe all states should be required to adopt a policy similar to Maine and Nebraska where the voting district gets an electoral representative based on the local vote rather than an "all or nothing" win of the state. This would encourage voters to vote because their local vote in the presidential election would actually matter.

Everyone knew it was a close election, and that the system we have is the system we have. It's not like the DNC was surprised by the electoral college last week.

People were blindsided because polling scientists treated the states discretely. What were the odds that Trump wins Ohio and Florida and Wisconsin and Michigan? This wasn't four separate battles -- it turns out that if he wins one of them, the odds are pretty good he wins all of them.

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