Agree. And from what I’ve seen, the impact of what happened on social media is vastly overblown. I saw a presentation at plotcon last year that really put the influence of social media into perspective for me.
The problem with the idea that anyone was able to influence anything is that the boundaries of what gets seen is largely affected by what you already think.
Clinton and Sanders supporters were not seeing a lot of the pro-Trump propaganda in terms of bot-posts and news feeds on Facebook at least (Facebook data about post views and news feeds was the topic of the presentation.)
And I have a hard time believing that spamming reddit actually caused enough of a shift to sway things in a meaningful way. It has the same echo chamber characteristics that Facebook exhibits, though I can’t prove that yet.
What I will say is possible is that the echoes in these silos could have been motivational in getting people who were already trump supporters to go out and vote, and the targeted ads against Hillary could have caused some people to stay home who would have otherwise voted for her.
I feel certain that Russia attempted to sway the election. I’m simply not convinced that they were able to do so.
There just isn’t enough uncertainty to be accounted for in my mental model of how things went down.
This was a contest between the two least popular candidates in the history of those metrics. Republicans hated Trump, and Democrats hated Hillary. It was a contest between who is the least biggest loser from the beginning.
Americans in general are feeling pretty bad about politicians and government. Everyone pretty much hates the whole shitstorm.
Trump also made better strategy decisions. He went to places in the final days of the campaign that Hillary should have been. But she was taking a victory lap and trying to bump numbers in red states instead of locking down the rust belt.
Hillay’s team had better polling data than we had in the national polls. She knew going back from before the primaries that Florida was a much closer race than what it looked like to us. To me, this was the most interesting thing that came out of the DNC leaks. Her team chose to ignore this and acted with a lot of hubris in general.
Comey’s behavior was pretty bad and caused a small but important last minute shift in the polls.
And in general, there is a real divide between city and country folks as well as between the wealthy and everyone else. I grew up on a farm in middle of nowhere Texas, I live in NYC now. The difference is real.
The models I was running with data from the DNC leaks and accounting for the average error of polling results vs election outcomes had Trump winning for weeks in advance of the election. I was so convinced and afraid of a Trump win that I took a week of unpaid vacation to work for the Hillary campaign.
The bottom line in U.S. elections is that Democrat and Republican voters are fairly static. Elections—ironically enough—are decided by 10-12% of the population that will swing one direction or the other based on who they are least pissed off at in the moment.
When I put all of these factors together, I can’t see very much uncertainty that’s not explained.
To be clear, I think that interference—even if it was only attempted and not effective—should be prosecuted and the Trump team should be impeached, indicted, and jailed.
But at the same time, I think people need to calm down about the effects of social media. I don’t see supportive data for the idea that it actually changed anything.
I certainly don’t see any evidence that says this is such a problem that we need to limit speech on the internet. Using the Trump win to set up legal restrictions of speech on social media is like using a terorist attack to limit your right to protest.
Oh fuck me. We already did that. I guess we’re probably screwed.