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Comment by cheese4242 | Hacker News Reader

The amount of false and misleading information spread about Trump has been staggering though. Trying to pretend this only goes one way is a joke.

Is there even any proof that these micro-targeting campaigns swayed the election in anyway? Has anyone stopped to consider that maybe enough people just preferred Trump over Hillary and the election outcome was not the result of a some facebook ads?

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People have written about it from that standpoint, sure. Summary: The Democratic Party in the days of Bill Clinton started building bridges to the rich classes, and betraying the working classes, and it snowballed from there. Now millions of people are repaying that fickleness and can be seduced to either side at will without so much as a platform, because they've learned platforms as presented aren't to be trusted anyway; and there's nothing to counteract any of that cynicism, no tangible concrete argument to be made, nothing in reality you can point to, that either party actually did for them. So all you have are ideas floating around with no basis in reality; pick one.

Even if it was 100% ineffective (and I think it's pretty obvious that it had a non-zero effect), that wouldn't even matter. They still tried to win by spreading lies.

Murder and attempted murder are both crimes.

I'm trying to interpret your comment in a charitable manner, but no matter what angle I come at it from it seems disingenuous ("whataboutism" comes to mind, for starters). No one in this thread has pretended that disinformation is mono-directional in the political arena; what has been stated is that there is a disproportionate amount of disinformation emanating from the conservative end of the media spectrum and that said misinformation has been coupled to the process of micro-targeting.

With the premise that advertisements are information streams that are designed to modify a person's behavior, I have few questions for you:

1. Do you believe that advertising is effective?

2. Do you believe that targeted advertising is more effective than non-targeting advertising?

3. Do you believe that misrepresenting information in an advertisement is acceptable?

>there is a disproportionate amount of disinformation emanating from the conservative end of the media spectrum

There is no evidence of this though. Have you considered that whatever you have read to suggest that a "disproportionate" amount of disinformation is from the right is itself a disinformation campaign by the left?

Maybe another way to look at it would be: Nobody would give a shit if "micro-targeting" had been used against Trump. The hand wringing over all of this is solely the result of a humiliated establishment trying to save face by pretending some Facebook ads cost them the election rather than their own hubris.

I'll ask again, what evidence is there that these micro-targeted ads swayed a single vote, much less the entire election? At what granularity is it "okay" to target an advertisement?

This is completely correct.

==The amount of false and misleading information spread about Trump has been staggering though.==

Much of it spread by himself, no?

I only have circumstantial evidence of seeing vulnerable family members slide into rabid fanaticism, rambling (nonsensically so) off obviously fake news stories as if they even understood the context. Falling pray to this type of propaganda is not a particularly conservative vs liberal thing from my perspective, it's just that the Conservatives have weaponized misinformation in an organized manner.

I don't see any evidence that the right has "weaponized misinformation in an organized manner" anymore so than the left has.

Honestly, I have a hard time finding any organized left-wing disinformation. Perhaps that's the evidence of left-wing disinformation?

Could you point me to some resources so that I might have a better understanding?

The whole "Trump is controlled by Russia" thing, for starters.

This doesn't seem like misinformation to me. Certainly there are people who believe Trump is somehow directly controlled by Russia, but it doesn't seem to be an organized effort. Whereas there is plenty of evidence that Trump was aided by Russia and has many financial ties to Russian oligarchs. This credibly opens up a wealth of possible ways that he could be compromised. It's one of the reason politicians attempt to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

I'm not sure how the pushing of the Trump/Russia narrative could be seen as anything but "organized".

I think this came up after Sacha Baron Cohen gave his famous speech at the ADL[1]. What makes social media political campaign so much more dangerous then traditional campaigns is that the investigative journalists don’t have the same access to the campaign claims as the targets, and hence cannot scrutinize, contextualize and compare them.

You are not alone in not seeing any evidence. Professional journalists with years of experience have the same problem.

But until we either learn how to overcome this limitation with new investigative techniques, or—better yet—regulate political campaigns with national laws, I suggest we remember the fact that: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”[2]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance#Absenc...

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