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Comment by vinhboy | Hacker News Reader

In the first post about this, people were like, how come they didn't do this to the Democrats in 2016.. Uhhh because they were not taking ANY aggressive actions in 2016 against anyone, that's why we are here. They are trying to correct a wrong. I applaud them for trying.

Also it's unfair to say they are doing this for political favoritism. Democratic politicians are the loudest ones calling for their breakup, ie. Bernie, AOC, Warren.

Reading this story without understanding the entire political landscape is as dangerous as the misinformation itself.

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Instead of blaming fake news and misinformation for the 2016 elections outcome, maybe the Democrats should look themselves in the mirror.

I have yet to see a clear decisive causation link between the Russian interference (e.g. bot farms) and the outcome of the election. Of course there was interference, nobody denies it. But show me that these trolls swayed the election. There is none.

Is there a word for the typical arguments that you see where there are 100 false premises and to even make your case you have to dismantle each one?

The Russia conspiracy theory is laden with these. So many conversations are very tedious because of the number of falsehoods you have to break down before you make any progress. Many folks seem to accept it as a given that troll farms were successful. The posts themselves are laughable.

Gish gallop comes close https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

> Instead of blaming fake news and misinformation for the 2016 elections outcome, maybe the Democrats should look themselves in the mirror.

Uh, that's not what left-leaning people are blaming the election results on. That's what right-leaning people claim left-leaning people blamed it on.

Left-leaning people blame the election result on racism, sexism, xenophobia, and intolerance. Donald J. "Grab 'em by the pussy" / "look at my large hands" / "birther in chief" / "interrupting cow" Trump is the direct result of the hatred that has been pouring out of talk radio and Fox News for the last several decades.

> Democratic politicians are the loudest ones calling for their breakup, ie. Bernie, AOC, Warren.

Censoring Bernie's/AOC's political rivals (carrot) could be a better move to avoid being broken up than punching back directly (stick) which may only motive them further.

> Democratic politicians are the loudest ones calling for their breakup, ie. Bernie, AOC, Warren.

Incidents like this may make Republicans a lot more interested in breaking up Facebook and Twitter...

If the populace as a whole thinks large corporations have too much power and want to spread the power out more, that’s certainly a coherent position. Run your email servers and lobby for anti-trust suits. The internet can certainly support a distributed model.

Well, I was thinking of it more as politicians playing politics than as them caring about what the populace as a whole thinks.

But certainly we can handle a distributed model. There's plenty of people who think it would work better (socially, not just technically).

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