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"Fake News" was a term created to explain why Hillary didn't win the election. If she had won, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Ironically, Trump has successfully comandeered the term to criticize his enemies in the media.

The problem is that the mainstream has lost its influence to a lot of smaller players and they are doing whatever they can to get it back. Facebook and Google are having political problems because they are viewed as part of the cause of the mainstream media's lack of influence and they are trying to comply with pressure from somewhere. I don't think fake news really hurts their bottom line. In fact, Facebook and Google being viewed as politically biased might be a reason for people to switch to other search engines, especially since nearly 50% of the U.S did vote for Trump after all.

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> especially since nearly 50% of the U.S did vote for Trump after all.

This is something I hear a lot. But according to [1] only 54.6% of the voting age population turned up to vote. Of that Trump got 46.1%[2]. So it's definitely not 50% of the country that voted for Trump. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St... [2] http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary-...

You can make that claim about most US elected officials. It's broadly understood that nowhere near 100% of the US voting-eligible population votes in elections, and that when someone says "50% of the population voted for...", it means that 50% of those who bothered to vote at all. It's the same thing as the stories you see citing a study that finds that X% of Y's have Z trait. Everyone understands that it's referencing a percentage of those included in the study, not the entire population.

Yes but 50% of America did not vote for Trump. He got nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.

The majority of Americans do not approve of him, after one month in office.

Depends on who you ask.

https://imgur.com/a/MzDa4

Why are you linking to approval ratings in a discussion about votes?

Read the last sentence of the person I replied to's comment.

Ah, I missed that. Fair enough.

What an interesting distribution... From the table it looks like there is a correlation between method and results. Are people less willing to put their trust in Trump over the phone than in anonymity, or are the people who are making calls biased, or...? :)

The assumption with the study you mentioned only works when those included in the study are a random sample of the population, expected to be representative. I'd argue that people who vote aren't a random sample and not representative of the population. In other words, when people don't like either candidate, they are more likely to stay home. Therefore, a percentage of the population that voted for a candidate could potentially be an interesting measure. Just pulled together some numbers by dividing the winner's popular vote by the total US population in that year, and was actually surprised at Trump's showing. He's at the median of all presidents since 1960. Not sure what meaning could be extracted from it, though, as there are many factors that would affect turnout.

Trump 16 - 19.5%

Obama 12 - 20.9%

Obama 08 - 22.8%

Bush 04 - 21.2%

Bush 00 - 17.9%

Clinton 96 - 16.9%

Clinton 92 - 17.5%

Bush 88 - 19.6%

Reagan 84 - 23.1%

Reagan 80 - 19.3%

Carter 76 - 18.7%

Nixon 72 - 22.3%

Nixon 68 - 15.8%

Johnson 64 - 22.3%

Kennedy 60 - 18.9%

Sources:

http://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table

http://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/

> Ironically, Trump has successfully comandeered the term to criticize his enemies in the media.

Ironically ? This was more predictable than the coyote's fate in cartoons.

Apparently the reaction to getting an undesirable leader in the white house is to prepare a massive shotgun, give it to the government (that said leader will be controlling), and make sure everyone is threatened by it.

It seems that because "of course" Hillary's defeat was nobody's fault, not hers [1], not the party [2], and not her supporters [3], and it wasn't Trump's efforts either, so it must have been nefarious actions from evil outsiders. This disaster started rolling to make sure this was the narrative surrounding Hillary's defeat.

Obviously, I feel like the the fault is not in our stars, not even the Russian ones.

This will get a lot worse before it gets better.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZHp4JLWjNw or http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/john-podesta-wikileaks...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVKC0egDBpk

(I am not saying the above links illustrate the reason we ended up with Trump. Each of them by themselves probably did not make enough difference to turn the tide. But they are fuckups. They did not help. Enough fuckups and you loose. And yes, I think Hillary lost the election much more than that Trump won it. Hillary defeated herself and Trump moved into the vacuum that remained without fucking up sufficiently himself. But making his election the actions of evil Putin ... stuff like that has the potential to give Trump 8 years. Frankly, even if it's true (because of course Russia ... and the US ... interfere in eachother's elections).

People were using fake news before hillary lost the election. The extreme amount of obviously rediculuous and impossible "articles" (yet believed by a fair amount of people) caused the widespread use of this. As an example, the endless stories about the comet pizza place and hillary hiding and supporting an international child trafficing ring or something like that.

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