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Comment by piracykills | Hacker News Reader

Much of it seems to more be designed to sew discord between the parties than to directly influence the election.

Mission accomplished I guess.

“sow discord” is an overused meme thrown around by people who choose to not form their own opinion but, instead, repeat what they read in the tabloids

I don’t know if you looked at the samples or not, but out of 6 samples only 2 can be considered remotely political. Sure, one uses a photo of Putin with a toast “let’s drink for politics”. At the stretch we could consider every “thanks Obama” meme a political one.

I think this is a distraction maneuver by Facebook to direct away attention from the latest events.

I suppose you're right, not necessarily between the two parties but between US citizens and each other, for which the parties are sometimes used as a proxy - you see lots of promotion of black rights groups with fringe views and far-right groups with thinly or completely unveiled racist views. Just little tricks that will hook a small number of people, but make the overall picture you see on TV look much worse than it is on average.

But there is none of that in these samples provided. It’s just memes and and garbage “viral” content a-la buzz feed.

I know there were other samples posted before that had more of what you are talking about. But I’m strictly speaking about the current batch and the article in question and screenshots from that article.

I’d imagine Facebook would cherry pick the most offending pieces to show off. And whatever evidence is currently presented seems weak at best.

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