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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

So, I'm not a Republican, and I didn't vote for DT, but the left's response to the 2016 election is really disappointing. It has been essentially a long list of reasons why they lost other than, "we didn't appeal to quite enough of the electorate". It was Russia, it was Facebook, it was everyone's a racist, it was anything other than something the Democratic party did or didn't do.

Facebook has issues, but the idea that it will "break democracy" is absurd, and kind of offensive.

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Democracy is “broken” for a variety of reasons, including deep problems with the parties themselves. But the role of news media in democracy is critical (in both senses of the word), and the rise of Facebook and other media based on unmoderated positive feedback loops is certainly not helping.

The tendency of old media to blame it has more to do with how much it threatens their bottom line than it does how much it's an actual threat to democracy though.

This article being a clear example of that.

The ultimate flaw with democracy is that it is predicated on the majority being right.

I think the premise is reasonable that FB (and other gigantic social networks) might be hurting democracy to some extent, but I also agree that the extent described here is absurd. However, perhaps ironically, I think the commonly held opinion you're expressing is actually dangerous. It's bad that people "blame" things too freely for their team's loss in democratic elections, but it's unavoidable, and while I do think there's more of it this time around, I think it's only because of a combination of two things: 1. There's more stuff to blame this time (right or wrong). 2. The winning team had a more mocking and disrespectful tone this time, openly represented even by the winning candidate himself, which is highly unusual.

My point is that your list isn't mutually exclusive (Facebook, interference, racism, bad Democratic candidate), and, anecdotally, every human being I know in person agrees those are all real issues that contributed, and only disagree on degrees, and those disagreements have always been reasonable. What I think is dangerous is broadly dismissing all those issues under the umbrella of "you lost, deal with it." Irrational blame-seekers will always point to every single issue they can - please don't let that cast a shadow on the issues themselves if you can.

They are not teams. They are not your team. Stop thinking about them like that. They are parties, representative, politicians. The team they are supposed be on is your team, the citizens of the nation they represent - red or blue, same team, different ideas.

What gets coverage in the news is not the totality of what is being said by Democratic or Republican politicians.

I reject your framing of what the left's response has been. In fact, analyzing the 2016 occupies little of the left's response. We have been tuning policies, and messaging. Did you even notice that we had some primaries recently, in which several well established incumbents lost to challengers with a new message? What more proof could you need that the left is making actual changes instead of excuses? Your "concern" is based on an untrue assumption.

Don't mistake what the media reports for reality, especially not when the media is so polluted with people determined to muddy everything and exacerbate conflict. That's the modern way to distort the political conversation, practiced both by our international adversaries and by the current administration's domestic allies. Modern citizenship requires being alert to it, and resisting rather than magnifying its effects.

Well I hope you are correct, and there certainly are some Democratic candidates (e.g. Beto in Texas) that seem to be adjusting. However, I don't think I would agree that the description "professional liars of the far right" fits the New Yorker.

The funny thing about lies is that they spread. Often, the people who spread them are unaware that they're doing so. Most journalists tend to follow an established narrative, so each fact they report might be true but the sum can still be deeply misleading. The New Yorker fits this mold, but their contribution isn't really even interesting. The more important question is: who made that the dominant narrative when it poorly represents reality, and how? Also, what part do you and I play in the spread of those harmful memes?

I agree. There was some examination of why he may have won in the first weeks after the election, but that aspect of the conversation has largely disappeared.

It's now all about the dark art of "fake news", almost as if, since he was elected illegitimately, none of the reasons he may have been elected matter.

I wonder if we'd even be having this discussion if Trump hadn't been elected. Probably at some level but not to the degree it has been.

>Facebook has issues, but the idea that it will "break democracy" is absurd, and kind of offensive.

Agreed. But there is no kind of about it.

The not-so-hidden subtext of the article is “how can Facebook get away with helping only Democrat candidates”

Even if you beleive in the ““theory”” that Trump was helped by Russian ads on Facebook, you’d need to admit about 1/2 were ProClinton or AntiTrump.

I have hopes they’re going to come to their senses. They’re driving away reasonable people.

But they did appeal to enough of the electorate. Clinton received ~3% more votes, which was in line with the polling data.

Unfortunately, because we have a system that makes certain Midwest and rust belt votes worth 3-10x more, Clinton lost anyway.

Most of what people have been complaining about actually happened. Russia really did interfere. Facebook turned a blind eye to massive misinformation campaigns on their platform. Facebook also knew about the Cambridge Analytica breach for quite a while before making it public. A lot of the voting and ads for Trump were driven by latent (or not so latent) racism.

It's not Facebook's "fault" that these things are happening any more than it's paper's fault if someone makes a racist poster. However, we can't ask paper to help us protect systems of election and governance that were invented before instant global communication.

Facebook is "just a platform," but we have the unique ability to ask the platform for help ensuring against abuse. I believe we must try to do that.

You seem to be using a metric we don’t use in this country.

Trump received 304 votes compared to Clinton’s 227.

People don’t vote for a president, they vote to direct whole their state votes. Each state vote is worth the same with larger states having more of them. This is the system we’ve had for 240 years.

I think you know all of this.

While there is a legitimate debate to be had about whether the electoral college is good or not, it is not new, and the Democrats knew about it before the 2016 election (we hope). They surely should have noticed it after the 2000 election. In 2009 they held all the levers of power, and could have chosen to eliminate it via constitutional amendment, but did not. Regardless of your opinion on whether they should have or not, they knew that the electoral college existed, that the Rust Belt would be important, and they chose their candidate and election strategy with full knowledge. It's also the same system that elected Obama, twice, and also Bill Clinton.

> But they did appeal to enough of the electorate. Clinton received ~3% more votes, which was in line with the polling data.

No, they didn't. The right and correct way to count votes isn't the method that would've given your side a victory; it's the way that was prescribed by the law as it existed at the time of the election.

> Unfortunately, because we have a system that makes certain Midwest and rust belt votes worth 3-10x more

This is the the result of a very old compromise. Maybe it should be reevaluated, but that's a separate issue.

I agree with the rest of your post.

To be fair there is also "It was Hilary" and "It was the Democrats". Not too much "It was Bernie".

Some establishment Dems have tried to blame Bernie in spite of how little sense that makes.

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