Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
1. Never stop talking about Trump. Mention his name 300 times an hour on CNN. He's not a serious candidate, but he is entertaining so they give him free publicity until he is a serious candidate.
2. Start blathering about Hillary's emails, as if that were somehow important.
3. Now Trump is elected. In these tough times, it is more important than ever to support high-quality independent journalism. Subscription numbers swell.
4. We need someone to blame for the outcome of this election. Obviously it is the fault of Facebook, Google, etc, who have been taking the media's ad revenue. Not the fault of the media who would never shut up about Trump.
I am really tired of this twisted version of the relative privation fallacy.
Trump is worse != Hillary was good
Her email situation was, in fact, an issue. Worse than Trump? Absolutely not. But even in context it doesn't belong in "as if that were somehow important" territory. Under normal circumstances (had she been elected) we'd probably still be talking about it.
Mentioning it at this point is sheer deflection. If you need a go-to example, pick someone in power like Kushner or Pence.
Meanwhile many tens of thousands (no way to know how many) of classified messages of the Secretary of State where available to any hacker but not to the oversight of the people and their Congress. It's no mystery why Comey said the stupid shit he said; if he had said nothing he would have had a mutiny on his hands.
I was sort of hoping you'd Google that too.
Vice President Mike Pence reportedly used a private email account to conduct public business, including homeland security matters, while he was governor of Indiana. Records of the emails were obtained by IndyStar through a public records request.
See, in the second sentence, we learn how this was different from the Secretary's emails! On top of which, this is Indiana we're talking about. Not much of geopolitical import there. I certainly hope that VP has learned proper email discipline at this point.
[0] https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2017/03/02/penc...
It works wonders for their human trafficking work
But sure. What about her emails. What about indeed. Kushner only had 100! We should do another investigation.
How much do the e-mails matter? I don't know, it's hard for there to be an objective answer since these things matter as much as everyone talks about them. Everyone talked about the e-mails, but did that conversation cross the threshold from factoid to scandal due to malicious acts by Russia?
Do the e-mails matter less than things happening in the Trump campaign at the time? It certainly seems that way, especially since there have been stories about Trump administration private e-mail servers that have barely made it into the news cycle (that's from memory, apologies if I'm not remembering that properly).
2. You need to think about the emails as compromised material and a failure to secure information. If you are an IT person that circumvents security protocols that then end up with trade secrets being exposed, would you be in trouble. The reason this was covered in the press was that it was classified information on an unsecured server.
4. I shake my head at this, Obama for America was doing the exact same thing in previous elections and no one batted an eye. Now that the people who were okay see that detrimental effects could happen there is concern. The simple thing to do would be to delete / minimize the information on your account.
Just remember, the media is horrible at their job; you have people who do not have the time to dig into a story, are influenced by their editors to drop stories if they attack a major sponsor, and then write stories that are stacked with grammatical mistakes.
[1] http://thehill.com/opinion/technology/379245-whats-genius-fo...
Disinformation of the public and spreading antagonizing rumor as fact was not invented yesterday. Assume all allegations and rumors are true, ride with it and see who looks more genuine.
Trump was destined for winning. His allure is not based on respect but grandiose dreams embedded in a nostalgic slogan. Without a politically-loaded surname he took the media by the balls and rode with it.
My best guess as an outsider is that he found people apt at selling stuff and sold to the public he was. Personal defamation ("grab them by the", buffoon, meme-made-president) is a minuscule issue in the eye of the public compared to a classified information leak scandal, "Don't forget Benghazi" and poor health rumors.
Hillary IMHO was counting on an idealistic, emancipated America when the people were rather leaning towards isolationism and making America greater than the competition.
I agree with you that such a vision is kind of a hard sell when compared with "Build the Wall!", "Lock her Up", and "Jobs!". Only the last of those base slogans ever appealed to me (not enough to make me vote for the cretin!), so I'm not disappointed that it's the only one that has happened so far.
Hacking Engineers and Engineering Media
"The entire social graph" did not agree to be used by the Obama campaign. What the Obama campaign did was worse that what CA could have done because by the time CA rolled around the API holes had been closed. (As I said yesterday, CA was deceptive and the Obama campaign wasn't, sure, because the Obama campaign didn't have to ask at all. This is not an improvement.) And they knew it was sketchy, too.
You would not approve if Trump did the exact same thing. That is not a question, because it doesn't need to be, and please don't insult anybody's intelligence by trying to claim otherwise. Either apply the standards evenly, or don't be shocked when the world turns on Silicon Valley for its unwillingness to apply the standards evenly.
But then CA got caught in a video sting talking about illegal and frankly horrifying tactics to compromise elections globally by attacking and comprimising politicians.
Facebook may view its internal policies as akin to the law, but I don't. The fact that CA violated some Facebook policy and OfA didn't is a distinction without difference. Facebook let both pull friends' personal information without consent, which people probably didn't realize they were sharing because Facebook has a history of obscuring sharing like that.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-towar...:
> Facebook is so accustomed to treating its ‘internal policies’ as though they were something like laws that they appear to have a sort of blind spot that prevents them from seeing how ridiculous their resistance sounds. To use the cliche, it feels like a real shark jumping moment. As someone recently observed, Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ are crafted to create the appearance of civic concerns for privacy, free speech, and other similar concerns. But they’re actually just a business model. Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ amount to a kind of Stepford Wives version of civic liberalism and speech and privacy rights, the outward form of the things preserved while the innards have been gutted and replaced by something entirely different, an aggressive and totalizing business model which in many ways turns these norms and values on their heads. More to the point, most people have the experience of Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ being meaningless in terms of protecting their speech or privacy or whatever as soon as they bump up against Facebook’s business model.
By their own admission.
Yes, Facebook's user agreement allowed them to do that. But I'd bet most people didn't consider that by signing up for Facebook, their personal profile data could be given to political campaigns without their knowledge, if any of their friends consented to it.
In the 1980s the media hated Reagan about as much as they hated Bush or Trump. Before that it was Nixon. But you really only heard about it if you watched the evening news, and that was 30 minutes of the day. It wasn't being fed to you continuously like an intravenous drip on your phone.
It's the speed and pervasiveness that have increased, not so much the partisanship.
While I wasn't mature enough then to form my own opinion about it, I'm under the impression that the media was also more restrained and professional back then. Now it seems a lot more tabloid, generally. There also seems to be a burring between "opinion/editorial" and reporting, especially online, which fuels the polarization.
There was a bit of comparative calm that settled in, from the immediate time after the Civil War, until the late 1960s. The level of ugliness of ideological attacks that Franklin Roosevelt saw, for example, were nowhere near what Obama & Trump have seen. That century was a far calmer era for political vitriol, than the 1780-1860 time frame, or since the late 1960s.
A not amusing Civil War era example:
"In 1856, U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a speech criticizing pro-slavery southerners. Three days later, he was beaten so badly - on the Senate floor - by U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina that he didn’t return to the Senate for three years."
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/the-ori...
And of course a lot of this wasn't entirely unfounded. Mr. Obama really was the first anti-American president; Mr. Bush really was incompetent; Mr. Clinton really was a perjurer, philanderer, power-abuser & possible rapist; Mr. Reagan really did lie a lot (e.g. Iran-Contra); Mr. Carter really was incompetent; Mr. Nixon really was a crook; Mr. Johnson really was a crook &c. &c. &c.
The fact that we keep on electing compromised, power-hungry people to a position of extreme power is no doubt part of the problem, but even back when the presidency was far weaker you had the partisans of Jefferson & Adams maligning one another with language we would be shocked at today.
The only recent American president I can think of who was mostly decent was probably Gerald Ford, who never ran for the position. Maybe that's the secret.
People think that because they are capable of pitching an anti-synthesis against a synthesis, they are intelligent - whereas nothing could be further from the truth. If you can't get out of the pro-vs-con mindset you are stuck in a trap designed to ensure you don't think beyond the curve, outside the event horizon of 'generally approved thought-process' society.
People need to be given uncomfortable positions to evaluate. Just maybe, its important to not discount the conspiracies and realise that in fact truth is stranger than fiction ..
It's said that Trump is terrible with journalists (he is). And there's Obama's quiet, terrifying war on journalists with the Espionage Act, that the partisans on that side almost entirely ignored.
Assisting in the destruction of Syria and Libya is a fine thing to ignore (one should perhaps get a nobel peace prize for it). Destroying Iraq is genocide and a war crime. Or vice versa, depending on which side you're on.
The sides just flip flop, memory wipe past misdeeds, and then resume the perpetual partisan war. I think it works to assist them in staying in power, maintaining the always conflict. Oceania is always at war with Eastasia.
The investigations are more successful so more leakers and whistleblowers get caught.
Will the US agression ever end? It is sickening.
I think the assumption that the wrongdoing was a conspiracy to get Trump elected gets far too much attention and is a secondary issue, but unlike the birther issue, there was quite a bit of funny business in general. The birther issue was just made up a priori.
The funny business, regardless of whether it benefited anyone, needs to be investigated. Once we understand what happened, then we can worry about whether it was an effort to swing the election or just a tactic for creating chaos.
It doesn't matter who's President.
It absolutely matters when something goes wrong outside our borders.
If, hypothetically speaking, a small NATO country on Russia's border devolves into chaos thanks to, say, a massive power grid failure combined with agitation from Russian nationalists, and Russia then intervenes to "stabilize" the situation, the temperament of the president and coherence of the White House as a whole would make a great deal of difference in how the crisis evolves.
Purely hypothetical, of course.
But it's March 2018. 5 of Trump's senior campaign staff are indicted. Multiple Russian actors are indicted. The Russian government doesn't even deny it, Putin literally blamed Jewish people. CA's c staff was just on video talking about using human trafficking to compromise politicians and their CEO just disclosed that some state governments were cooperating with the Trump campaign.
All this is astride the long understood fact that American election security is so bad that there aren't reliable records to disprove a machine that's been tampered with. What's more, the we've also seen corroborated evidence that the machines election officials in some swing States we're compromised by sophisticated actors. These machines aren't just where emails happen, they're the machines where the software that configures the voting machines runs (for some models).
None of what I've said is even an uncharitable reading of the facts. The final statement might be surprising but it's well supported in security literature.
But sure, you be skeptical as a well-measured and coldly logical citizen.
In this context, is it curious that no one has signed on to co-sponsor the following bill?
https://congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/5147/tex...
No one has signed on to HR 5147 because everyone (84 members, all Democrats) who cares enough about election security to cosponsor a bill on it has instead signed on to cosponsor HR 5011 [0], which is a much broader election security bill; to the extent the specific requirements in HR 5147 are desirable and not address by HR 5011, they probably make more sense as an amendment to HR 5011.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/5011...
HR 5011, rather than trying to cobble together a bandaid over hackable electronic voting systems, has its central mitigation the voting system problem (it addresses more election infrastructure than just ballot-casting) incentives and grants to get rid of electronic voting altogether in favor of the proven system of voter-marked paper ballots. Voter-marked ballots that are the thing that is counted in the normal case is much better than voter-verified receipts that are selectively or conditionally used to audit counts, and open source is irrelevant when there is no software, and the idea that open source is somehow equivalent to secure has been refuted time and again.
Now, sure, it arguably [0] wouldn't be bad to add something like HR 5147s requirements for hold-outs that aren't going to abandon electronic voting into HR 5011, and that would be a very good debate to have when HR 5011 (or, more realistically, the similar bill introduced in the next Congress) is heard in committee.
[0] Arguably not, though, because that could encourage people to see electronic voting as safer than it is; maybe better would be to amend in a hard deadline requirement for abandoning electronic voting in favor of voter-marked paper ballots, a stick to go along with the grant-money carrot.
The voting machine observations aren't new. They're old, some dating back to Bush-era elections.
I think technological illiteracy and States refusing to replace costly machines represent the bulk of the opposition.
And that’s the electoral (as opposed to policy) side of why 84 of them are cosponsoring a much broader election security bill than Gabbard’s HR 5147 (and, to be clear, one that was introduced before Gabbard’s “me too” bill.)
And that completely dysfunctional political system certainly played a role in the last election.
In Michigan there is a constitutional referendum coming up that will take that power away from them if it passes.
Admittedly, that's sort of an exception that proves the rule. Only NE and ME don't operate under a winner-takes-all, they've so far only split their votes once each (2008 in NE and 2016 in ME), and their votes -- certainly splitting their votes -- has never impacted the result of a Presidential election.
If this were Nixon, wouldn’t it be an appropriate response to hope that all involved were caught?
If wanting to see this kind of criminality be ended is “salivating” call me Mr. Drooly.
Well, it was certainly an incident of corruption and/or incompetence. People do (and should) get fired for mishandling sensitive information.
Maybe the HN community in general wants to give Clinton a pass on it, but investigating facts that illustrate the character and competence of presidential candidates is certainly newsworthy.
There was plenty of similar corruption and incompetence to report on for Trump, but its generally easier and more salacious to report on his Cinco de Mayo taco salad.
Campaign promises are usually seen as best effort. Are we still waiting for Mexico to pay for that wall?
> The second scandal required a fair amount of investigation, but that investigation was fairly legible to voters.
Yes, it is very straight forward and the FBI went over it multiple times, to the point that Comey had to be extra diligent in reporting the investigation's progress to avoid a tinge of bias in the FBI.
> The third requires voters to believe what they're told by unnamed sources:
There has been plenty of "coincidences" thus presented so far. I for one would apply Hanlon's razor: Trump and his advisers were just being very stupid and don't think any malice was involved, though breaking the law is breaking the law regardless (see their opinion on stupidity and Hillary's emails). Besides, thou dost protest too much, so maybe there is more to this than we can see right now.
I don't think any of this leads to impeachment, which really isn't in anyone's interests anyways (Pence?). Instead, Trump will be a two year lame duck after the midterms with little public support left.
It might seem like this if you ignore lots of facts. Comey started the investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016. Hillary point-blank called Trump a Russian puppet during a debate in October 2016. Both of these events happened before the election, your assertion doesn't match the history.
Edit: It was also big news when the RNC platformed changed to a more pro-Russia stance. Again, before the election. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trum...
I'm not sure what relation this has to the fact that Trump-Russia connections were being investigated prior to the election. That fact is contrary to the comment you made that it only started in order to explain why Hillary lost. Have you ceded that false premise yet or are we just moving on to the next deflection?
You're also leaving out Guantanamo, assassination of American citizens without a trial, and the Fast and the Furious scandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal).
5. Russia and Hackers and Collusion Oh My!
> Not the fault of the media who would never shut up about Trump.
But look at the ratings and the ad money they are getting? It's the same thing with school shootings. Massive 24/7 coverage turning the shooter into a celebrity. Then they wonder why shootings happen. Oh it couldn't be the media. They can't blame themselves. It must be guns. Another gem is "why is society so divided"? Could it be the media playing population/groups off each other to create drama and make more money? Of course not. They can't blame themselves. So it must be social media and the internet.
We're literally in the middle of yet another Red Scare. You can speak out against such nonsense without being a Trump supporter.
Facebook and Google are media. They are just more effective at engagement than TV. The CNN stuff is particularly telling there as their reach is very low. More people are watching baseball on a given day than CNN. Shows like "Pawn Stars" can attract more viewship than all cable news combined.
Since I am a cynic, I see that despite their professed political allegiances, the news media are quite pleased by the prospect of seven more years of political insanity. Every USA president from now until the breakup on will be a veteran of reality TV.
The other day, I took a taxi. The driver was talking about how he stopped logging into Facebook, consuming the news, etc. and was instead focusing on spending more quality time with his wife and daughters. He was the happiest person I spoke to yesterday.
We already had what we needed to be happy. Entertainment tools like Facebook are good insofar as we are made better people. Perhaps it's time for us to reflect on how satisfied we are with the people we've become, and accept the personal responsibility of bettering ourselves before we try to save the world.
"Turn on, tune in, and drop out."
But no, she implies, this mass panic is unjustified. After all, something something Hilary Clinton. Something something information society. There is nothing we can do because we can and should be powerless to regulate companies.
What an awful opinion piece.
edit: one of many, many articles you can find criticizing Megan McCardle https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/megan-mcardle... ... this is not a non-sequitur attack on her thesis, but I am saying that she has a long track record that one should be aware of before reading her OpEds.
People don't like to admit that the people in swing states are mostly against globalisation, wall street and the system as it is.
Trump spent less than half what Clinton did on ads. I truly believe he could have spent nothing and still won. Voters are just pissed off at the current state of affairs.
The share button is the cheapest ad campaign you can ever hope for. You only pay for the first view, all the share are free.
It also helps when another country pays for your ad campaigns ;) but that's a whole other story.
It takes a lot to switch from Democrat to Conservative, not just some news that you read on the net. Political opinions are not that fluid and don't change easy.
I agree with you, though. If Vlad can swing our elections by posting shit on social media, then he absolutely should. All those gun-hating Europeans we hear from constantly should, as well: I'll have to turn in my rifle by this time next year. Any other person, anywhere should voice her own opinions about our elections. That is fundamental to our system of government. When we made a list of important rights, that one came First. The news media liked that, back when they had different concerns than they have now.
The preceding notwithstanding, Facebook is horrible.
That's not to say that people are pretty careless about privacy management (and security), but this went well beyond what the informed public thought was happening (or possible) on FB during those years.
I suspect that most people are as clueless about what is really going on as those villagers.
Those who control the media, though, just like the shaman, are extremely adept at sizing up the public emotion.
For what it's worth, if I understand it correctly, the most interesting aspect of this is that using machine learning techniques they managed to translate the actual tags that they wanted to target (gay/square/racist/unemployed/man/rightwing/white/latino etc etc) to the less revealing tags actually offered by fb, and in this way direct propaganda more accurately.
FB's "crime" is painted as data security. The "criminals" are trump, Bannon, Putin or whoever is alleged to have used this data to "manipulate public opinion." This misses the entire point.
FB's business model is based on using large datasets of mundane (in isolation) information in order to "profile" people. More specifically, score people for likelihood to do X, where X is refinance a loan, go to a diet seminar or whatever an advertiser wants.
The key point is large quantities of mundane data, not necessarily stuff that is protected.
Someone got a hold of a small subset of FBs dataset and presumably used it to target political messages or whatnot.
This is exactly what all FB advertiser's do every day.
If we're calling this incident "manipulating public opinion" or "foreign meddling"... Then the problem is 10,000X times bigger than this case. This stuff is all around us.
"Facebook, of course, lets you target exactly those boring, old demographic qualities" - just boring old mundane everyday Facebook. No worries here
"To be clear, what Cambridge Analytica did was somewhat worse" - Just a bit worse, but not too far from the norm
"Facebook no longer allows anyone to do this, thankfully, and hasn’t for years" - this has been a non-issue for years, what are you worried about?
This is made possible by the way the issue is framed, as a data security issue. Well, it isn't hard to imagine an identical scenario playing out where no data was "leaked," with everything being legal and normative data collection.
If FB had done with their own data whatever these 3rd parties are alleged to have done... would any laws have been broken?
It's hard to get a read on it, but there are plenty of people slagging Cambridge Analytica as being pretty worthless.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/cambridge-analytica-claimed-...
> In the video posted by Channel 4, Nix is heard saying that the company did much of the work behind Trump's campaign, which resulted in a shocking upset victory over Hillary Clinton in November 2016.
> "We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting," Nix says on the video. "We ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign, and our data informed all the strategy."
This article seems pretty clear headed and makes the Nix quote sound like a sales pitch:
https://www.wired.com/story/what-did-cambridge-analytica-rea...
Here's looking at you ISPs, Telcos, Ad Platforms, so-on. Your campaign is working pretty well so far.
Not because of my politics (non-american) but because that set the intellectual level of the author. Life is too short to be reading this kind of garbage
However, if there were bots and trolls posting inflammatory content that motivated voters that would have other wise stayed home - that could have influenced turnout and an election. If those bots and trolls were funded by a foreign government, then that is even more concerning.
I would like to see 'mainstream media' focus more on that part of it, this Cambridge Analytica company sounds like they were really good at taking campaign money.
http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html
And this kind of scape-goating - throws the 'baby out with the bath-water' as it were. Basically we need illusions and they effect how we all live. Especially when we all agree on what illusions we want to share...
The company he founded reflects his work ethics.
Personally I don't care that much when the bully starts being bullied. You reap what you sow.
It's not like people just decided "I don't know who Mark Zuckerberg is yet, but I despise him".
That's an ego-driven 19-year-old geek, lamely boasting to friends.
A rather large proportion of people were once ego-driven 19-year-olds lamely boasting to friends. I sure was.
Certainly, every 19-year-old has an under-developed prefrontal cortex and thus makes decisions driven much more by emotion than rationality [1].
But only due to achieving vast success, do people like Zuckerburg have people continually using comments from their adolescence to smear their reputation when they're well into their 30s.
It occurs to me that it's the same kind-of ego-driven smugness that motivated 19-year-old Zuck to make that comment, that motivates his detractors to keep raising it 14 years later in order to make themselves feel morally superior to him.
Zuck may have grown up, become a father, embraced spirituality and turned much of his attention to philanthropy, yet his critics continue to be fixated on this one lame comment by a 19-year-old as the "gotcha" that reveals everything about his character.
As dang said a few days ago [2], there are many valid bases on which to critique Facebook and Zuckerberg, but this is not one of them.
[1] https://mentalhealthdaily.com/2015/02/18/at-what-age-is-the-...
Since when is Facebook a new communciation(s [sic]) medium?
Her word choices and her not so deft deflections make me almost wonder if this is very subtle satire. The only other conclusion I can come up with is that she's a Mercer or Koch shill.
The tactics employed with this CA/FB saga were far seedier and subversive than just standard targeted advertising (and I believe she knows this).
What tripe.
"'They were on our side': Obama campaign director reveals Facebook ALLOWED them to mine American users' profiles in 2012 because they were supportive of the Democrats"
Is this news in the USA?
Not sure that it's a perfectly direct line between [Trump won] > (Facebook is to blame), because the story seems to be mostly about user data, but it's pretty close.
the people with the tinfoil hats predicted all this in the 90s but nobody was listening (except "THEM")
Media started feeding us stories how social networks are "bad for you", then slowly ramped up to give us the "piece de resistance": your soul (your data) has been sold to the devil.
Come on, isn't anyone else seeing it?!
ps: we have been programmed to believe this is not happening so i won't be surprised if this gets down-voted by the sheeple...
ps#2: it might not be a group or organization but just the result of a poorly built internet eco-system.
The media decisions on "what shows up in the news" is well known, but under-reported (for obvious reasons). Whatever shows up in the news is meant to increase the value of these 6 companies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_U...) and advance their CEO/boards personal agendas for the United States and world.
If you take what shows up in standard media's headlines as "what's worth talking about" you are playing their game.
It’s almost like there’s a “trending news” sidebar that these shadowy people added and put in whatever they feel like and whoops we’re talking about Facebook again aren’t we?
All the viral trends can be traced back to one-two sources which got picked by influential media, everybody else is talking about it because others do the same. The media always worked that way, it's nothing new, it's just more apparent in the age of hyperconnectivity.
User engages with material that matches their base desires, they are seduced and enveloped by these illusions, and the illusory experience of having their internal life seemingly manifest in the real world, this feels important to them so they form groups on this basis, like the prisoners in Plato's allegory of the cave. Facebook optimizes for engagement, presenting this user with more specialized material, eventually this material detaches from reality altogether. However this results in a skeptical cul-de-sac where the meaningfulness of Facebook is ignored. Instead it is scapegoated so that we can largely avoid taking responsibility for our actions. To refute these claims Mark Zuckerberg has emphasised our agency in deciding what Facebook is for and does. Regarding Fake News he has said:
> “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news … If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.”
And regarding the Filter Bubble:
> “The research also shows something that is a little bit less inspiring, which is that we study not only people’s exposure in Newsfeed to content from different points of view, but then what people click on and engage with. By far the biggest filter in the system is not that the content isn’t there, [or] they don’t have friends who support the other candidate or are of another religion, [it’s that] you just don’t click on it. You actually tune it out when you see it. You have your world view. You go through, and I think that we would all be surprised how many things that don’t conform to our world view that we just tune out.”
Usefully Winnicott’s transitional object helps us out of the skeptical cul-de-sac by foregrounding our agency in choosing our illusory experiences and thereby restoring their hopeful character. It also matches Mark Zuckerberg’s informed view on what happens on Facebook.