Right now the left and the right are aligned in their loathing of Facebook -- but every time the message "Facebook helped Trump get elected because his supporters are racists and easily manipulated" is parrotted it serves to encourage them to take the opposing side to defend themselves and claim Facebook's tactics are being overblown. They'll never defend Zuck, but they will fight against clamping down on tech companies in the name of defending capitalism and American jobs (and, without saying so, as a way to assert they were not manipulated and resent being called racists.)
Did his Facebook ads specifically take advantage of the fact that he was black? Did his ad campaign benefit from inflaming racial divisions?
To be fair, advertising from the trump campaign may not have played on racial tensions either. The thing people are upset about is the russian interference. The russians bought ads and made posts that clearly stoked tensions, and Facebook was negligent in preventing this.
That was not the claim. The claim was that he "harvested" racial tensions. And of course he did.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/107770/most-say-race-will-facto...
Blacks were 19% more likely to vote for Obama because he was black and 2% less likely. Whites were 5% more likely to vote for Obama because he was black and 6% less likely.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/local-elections/20...
Obama ended up with near-unanimous support from the black vote in the primaries, beating Hillary.
I would add to that his infamous “god and guns” speech, and his behavior in the primaries, including his shameful dance around the Jeremiah Wright issue.
I think the result was largely in support of pushing back against the ideas of political correctness. I know many fine people who voted and support Trump. It isn't that they are racist, bigoted, etc. It's that they believe our country was spiraling into a state where you couldn't be, and that was too much an affront to free speech. (For example, wanting to secure our borders so that your own children born here would have a better chance at finding a job was becoming "racist")
The Trump campaign, on the other hand, struck me as trying to put down the others. Totally negative.
I don't think those two are equivalent.
Part of the reasons conservatives see Obama as divisive is because conservatives tend to believe that most wealth in America is earned through hard work and sacrifice, and many believe that they can better their own financial means through these things. So even for those that aren't at the level of wealth being targeted by the politicians, this language is negative and divisive to conservatives in general because it instills a deep sense of unfairness and mistrust by targeting those who "earned" their wealth and painting them as takers.
Ha. Citation needed.
Most wealth in America is concentrated in the hands of a small number of incredibly wealthy families. It is plainly ridiculous to suggest that someone with billions of dollars has worked harder or sacrificed proportionally more than a single mother working two jobs.
Hard and sacrifice are simply not the driving factors in wealth generation.
Re-read my post: you're yelling at a strawman. Conjecture: seeing the sequence of words "most wealth in America is earned through hard work and sacrifice" immediately blinded you to the context they were written in (namely: my observation that this is a belief of a large part of America and their actions are a logical induction from those beliefs) and you flipped the bit and went right into attack mode.
Reflect on that, and realize that this kind of blinded reaction lies at the core of why lots of things are being said but no actual communication is occurring between people around these subjects.
edit: I'd also like to suggest that uncritically parroting false assertations like the one you posted is a poor way to advance discourse.
The place that I think we might disagree is in the value of neutrally presenting positions in the way that you did. Have you ever listened to an NPR piece on climate change? NPR tries very hard (too hard, in my opinion) to present "both sides" of an argument. The impact is that they tend to do something like, "today we have a leading scientist, and Joe who works in the local coal mine." Joe's opinion is simply not as valuable as the leading scientist, and by uncritically presenting them as equal they muddy the issue and ultimately spread disinformation. The whole "both sides" thing is just not as valuable as we tend to act like it is, in my opinion.
Yes, it is valuable to understand where people are coming from. It is more valuable to be correct.
Those who ask for citations should also give them...
Your claim is therefore either poorly worded, or unsupported by your citation.
And if I'm going to complain about your lack of citation, I should give one. Wikipedia (yeah, I know) says in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite... that "Currently, the richest 1% hold about 38% of all privately held wealth in the United States." That's a lot, but it's not enough to make "most wealth in America is concentrated in the hands of a small number of incredibly wealthy families" accurate.
You are correct that comparing the top 1% to the bottom 90% is mildly hard to reason about due to leaving out the 2nd through 9th percentile, but I feel like the overall point stands. (Well, and in general, I think it's pretty clear that hard work and sacrifice simply do not usually result in wealth. That was my original point.)
In the absence of hard data, I would accept that 5% of the country is a reasonable guess as to the who controls 51% of the wealth.