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Ok, so people living outside major cities in UK voting against centralization of unaccountable power in the EU and unemployed, politically abandoned industrial

Ok, so people living outside major cities in UK voting against centralization of unaccountable power in the EU and unemployed, politically abandoned industrial workers in the US Rust Belt were just a bunch of idiot rubes tricked by click bait headlines. Does it occur o anyone they may have actually had real grievances against globalization? Maybe they were tired of being belittled by metropolitan and coastal elites ignoring those grievances and dismissing them as racists to be ignored.

DiNovi 10y ago
Perhaps those grievances get obscured when people parrot the same nonsense about "elites" that the AI propaganda spouts.
AbrahamParangi 10y ago
If the options are: 1. Public (online) discourse is vulnerable to manipulation by bad-faith actors (and this manipulation is impactful on a geopolitical scale). 2. The events of the US election and Brexit were symptomatic of unrecognized problems and unheard voices. These ideas can both be true. Frankly, I find the notion that (1) isn't true too far-fetched to believe. It sounds like far too good of a business opportunity. Running ads is a valuable activity not because every person who sees the ad becomes a customer, but because in aggregate x% of viewers will consider a purchase and y% will become good customers. Cambridge Analytica sounds to me like they're just applying the standard techniques of digital content marketing to a relatively unsophisticated realm (political advertisement).
- flukus 10y ago
  1 has been true for a very long time, long before the internet existed, it's commonly known as astro turfing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing), the wikipedia articles cites Shakespeare is the first known (albeit fictional) example. The approach was instrumental in preventing action on climate change.
- leereeves 10y ago
  > Public (online) discourse is vulnerable to manipulation by bad-faith actors (and this manipulation is impactful on a geopolitical scale). This is true, but it's not limited to the right. Just one example, the Washington Post and other liberal papers reported that a Muslim-American Olympian was detained by customs. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/02/09/muslim-american-olympian-ibtihaj-muhammad-says-she-was-detained-by-u-s-customs/#comments https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/02/09... The fake part? They never mentioned that it happened in December.
nerdponx 10y ago
That is why they voted for who they voted for. But if you look at the track records of the people they voted for (in the US: the Christian Right in 2000, the Tea Party in 2012, and Trump in 2016), it's no better woth regard to privacy. And apart from some regional excepions it's not better in any other category either. If you think a vote for Paul Ryan is a vote against unaccountable power you are badly deluded.
- iak8god 10y ago
  > If you think a vote for Paul Ryan is a vote against unaccountable power you are badly deluded. Forget Paul Ryan. Does the billionaire President of the United States, brought to power (to almost everyone's surprise) by this populist wave, seem especially accountable to anyone? FFS, the man broke the long-standing traditions of releasing tax returns as a candidate, and has utterly failed to even give the appearance of separating himself from his business interests, and his broke working class base doesn't bat an eyelash. They're not looking for accountability. They're looking for someone to blame ("elites", "illegals", "muslims") and for someone to tell them it'll all be OK.
Mtinie 10y ago
> Maybe they were tired of being belittled by metropolitan and coastal elites ignoring those grievances and dismissing them as racists to be ignored. They could be. Or they could have been manipulated into believing that there was a cadre of elitist puppet masters out to get them. It's obvious that there are issues all across the socioeconomic spectrums, all over the planet. I'm more apt to believe that for the most part that people all over are quite similar, but propaganda triggers and psychometric targeting make it seem like we are light years apart.
skybrian 10y ago
We should distinguish between techniques used and how they're applied. It's possible to use advertising to: 1) Sell soap. 2) Let people know about a new movie. 3) Scam people out of their life savings (find people who fall for a Nigerian prince scam). 4) Own devices (phishing). 5) Swing undecided, low-information voters in an election. The techniques may be quite similar. The consequences, very different. Ad tech is powerful technology that doesn't discriminate. Large advertising networks do have content policies preventing outright scammers, phishing, and often just things they don't want on their network, but there are always new techniques. So this is just another example of why we can't have a nice libertarian-inspired Internet like we all dreamed of when the Internet was new. There are always bad guys and gray areas. Any popular service that attracts a large enough audience gets abused and the service providers inevitably end up policing it, so then they start making tough policy decisions about what's okay. (Or if they don't, customers and various interest groups will complain.)
lazaroclapp 10y ago
The grievances are real, no doubt. Are they voting for the best person to solve those issues based on an understanding of possible policies? Or because they just got advertised "Vote Trump, ban immigrants, build $20 billion walls, and then you'll have a job!" Keep in mind people voted in part based on a campaign promise to repeal "Obamacare" even when they depended on the ACA for their lives, without realizing they were one and the same. Anecdote does not data make, but there also have been a few prominent examples of families that were broken up when the U.S. citizen portion voted Trump and their relatives were then affected by the travel ban. There are real economic grievances, no one is saying there aren't. Those grievances were there the election before this one, and the one before that (2008, remember? right now the economy and employment are objectively at their best since at least that time). But there is also an ideological, cultural component, which is ripe for being modulated by propaganda. See e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/its-putins-world/513848/?utm_source=twb https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/its-put... .
badsock 10y ago
I agree 100% that the working class people in America have been screwed over. But just because they've been wronged doesn't mean that their solutions are right. Dumb ideas deserve to be attacked. Ideas that are an affront to practically every positive development that dragged us out from under the rule of the oligarchs of the 19th century and the fear-mongering ideologues of the 20th, deserve to be attacked. If that hurts the feelings of those who are promoting them, that's unfortunate, but it's the price of admission if you're trying to exert influence in the public sphere.
- flukus 10y ago
  > I agree 100% that the working class people in America have been screwed over. But just because they've been wronged doesn't mean that their solutions are right. The problem is that no one is putting forward better solutions. "The left" is now run by educated elites, not the working class, "the right" might not represent the working class, but at least they don't ignore them.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    A lack of better solutions of on offer (which isn't true by the way, but lets ignore that for a moment) doesn't excuse making terrible choices. The truth is that there are other solutions, but they're seen as troublesome for a number of reasons. Compounding that is the fact that people so dim they'd see value in the "solutions" offered by someone like Trump often aren't aware of the possible solutions that have been considered. It's possible to be the victim of your own desperation, which is just what such people perpetually have been throughout history. Everyone sees that kind of person as a rube, Left, Right, and Center... it's always just a fight for their hearts and minds. By the way the Right doesn't ignore the working class, but they actively hurt them. I somehow doubt that the working class wants that kind of attention.
    - flukus 10y ago
      If your attitude is to keep talking down Trump voters as being idiots don't expect any sympathy from me when Trump gets re-elected. In fact, the more you marginalise them the more radical and United they will get, before you criticize others for acting against their own self interest realise that you're doing the same. > It's possible to be the victim of your own desperation, which is just what such people perpetually have been throughout history. Everyone sees that kind of person as a rube, Left, Right, and Center... it's always just a fight for their hearts and minds. Yes, and the guy offering a bad solution looks better than the guy offering no solution.
bobdole1234 10y ago
I always find it funny when people say they're tired of being called racists. They'll bitch till they're blue in the face about how it's unfair that just because they want people like them to succeed they're called racists. I wonder what they think racism is if not that?
- flukus 10y ago
  I wonder what you think racism is because the people you're describing don't seem interested in discrimination based on race.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  > I always find it funny when people say they're tired of being called racists. You mean the people from the Middle America? Well it helps to live there for a while. I did for a about 10 years. You know what most people there don't think when they first wake up? That's right, racist thoughts. They think about getting groceries, hopefully kids did their homework, when the bills are due, why Steven is being a jerk at work and so on. They don't yawn and stretch thinking "I hope all the people with certain skin pigment different than mine fail!". > they want people like them to succeed they're called racists. I have never heard anyone say "I want people like me to succeed" based on race. Maybe I wasn't hanging out with a bad crowd. But I've heard them say "I want to succeed" or "I want my children to be successful" is that racist? I am an immigrant, is it wrong to say "I want immigrants to succeed". Am I racist now? Oh oh. > always find it funny when people say they're tired of being called racists. I am wondering. How do you expect people to respond when they are called racists. Let's imagine you walk down the street. Someone turns a corner wearing that stupid Trump hat, you yell out "You racist!". What would be a realistic positive outcome from that?
  - bobdole1234 10y ago
    You honestly think that people who get called racist enough to have a recurring rant about it are talking about wanting immigrants to succeed? Or that I wander the streets calling people racist?
rdtsc 10y ago
> politically abandoned industrial workers in the US Rust Belt were just a bunch of idiot rubes tricked by click bait headlines. They had to be. Fake news, those sneaky Russians, a white-supremacist deep state conspiracy. It is what happens when people live in a bubble. They can pretend nothing else exists. Facebook posts all come from the same group of friends, those who don't agree are unfriended, and so on. News channel all pump the same reassuring message about an almost certain win and even show a map with all states filled in blue. Until of course the bubble pops then it just becomes too much. There was certainly a surprise element but I am surprised how surprised some people were and how they overnight went from stoic intellectuals lecturing those Trump rednecks about integrity of our electoral system, and how they better not riot and get angry and agree with the results of the election, to irrational and angry conspiracy theorists. > most clearly with pro-Trump campaigners and programmers who carefully adjusted the timing of content production during the debates, strategically colonized pro-Clinton hashtags, and then disabled activities after Election Day,” That was interesting. The most visible example is probably "Fake News" it was a term appropriated and used to label mainstream media like CNN, NBC, NYT and WaPo. It had gotten to a point where Washington Post sent out an explicit request for everyone to please stop using that term because it has been taken over so to speak. > According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads reminding certain selected black voters of Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘super predator’ line. It targeted Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with messages about the Clinton Foundation’s troubles in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.’” One thing I noticed Hillary organized a Jay-Z concert. I guess she heard that Black people like rap and paid Jay-Z to throw the n-word at them a few times. What an awkward way to connect. A while back I managed to find a speech Trump gave to a mostly Black community and he didn't do half bad. It was a very small gathering. It was probably never going to be a community that would vote for him as a block like they did for Obama. But at least he tried to talk about inner cities, inequality, crime, safety, jobs, education. > Political analysts in the Clinton campaign, who were basing their tactics on traditional polling methods, laughed when Trump scheduled campaign events in the so-called blue wall -- a group of states that includes Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and has traditionally fallen to Democrats. I think there is a bit of the oscillation happening. Trump went from an arrogant stupid idiot to this super cunning and smart villain who used those evil AI bots to win. Why didn't Hillary try that same software and those same bots? Guessing by implication is because her campaign was honest and they played by the rules.
mirimir 10y ago
The concern here isn't about who won, in the UK or the US. The concern is about personalized propaganda. There's nothing new about propaganda. There's nothing new about astroturfing. There's nothing new about targeted advertising. What's new is how effectively Cambridge Analytics combined and leveraged them.
- gydfi 10y ago
  Then why is all the discussion in terms of who did win? People who don't like the result are "blaming" this phenomenon, without regard for the fact that this is something that everyone is presumably doing. When Obama won, I seem to remember a lot of people around here praising the success of his social media strategy.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Yes, after Obama won, there was talk of using his social network to help drive his agenda. That didn't work out so well, I think. But the Brexit and Trump teams did a far better job of it. So yes, we have an arms race, and those with the best AI will become the power brokers. I like the analogy to high-frequency trading. Neither market valuation nor democratic process are very meaningful when driven by machine learning.
    - gydfi 10y ago
      I'm not convinced that Trump had a better social media operation, just that he had a more compelling message. Stuff like /r/the_donald grew organically, people devoted thousands of hours of their own time to Trump memes, because they were inspired by what Trump had to say. Hillary's support was approximately as widespread, but less deep. Trump's online rallies were bigger for the same reason his real world rallies were bigger.
bsder 10y ago
> Does it occur o anyone they may have actually had real grievances against globalization? Your assessment might hold water except that they also sent back the congressmen responsible for the situation in record numbers. So, even if I give them that they believed Trump was their champion, what are we to make of the fact that they sent everybody else responsible for the situation back? > Maybe they were tired of being belittled by metropolitan and coastal elites ignoring those grievances and dismissing them as racists to be ignored. Yet they bitch, complain and fight when said coastal elites attempt to help things: see Obamacare. Even a SINGLE moderate Republican senator driven by moderate constituents would have made the ACA a lauded national accomplishment and enabled compromise instead of a partisan war. There wasn't a SINGLE moderate Republican senator in the entire batch. Not ... one ... You can't fight people when they attempt to help and then complain when they give up and tell you to get stuffed and go die in a fire. And, from what I can tell, the ACA was the breaking point where the left finally threw in the towel that there was any working with the right and that they should simply be left to rot. > Ok, so people living outside major cities in UK voting against centralization of unaccountable power in the EU and unemployed, politically abandoned industrial workers in the US Rust Belt were just a bunch of idiot rubes tricked by click bait headlines. Pretty much. Whenever I sit down an talk to people to explain the ACA stuff, I invariably get "Well, nobody ever told me that." Of course they didn't. Most things in the ACA are driven by the fundamental choices that most people agree with. If you agree with no exclusions for preexisting conditions, then you need to amortize the sick over the well. That implies sign up periods and getting the healthy to sign on when they really don't want to. etc. Unfortunately, that's too subtle an argument to get through a wall of interference of "Obama's a muslim and wants to oppress Christians! They wanna take arrr gunzzzz! Mexicans took all arrr jerbs!"
- stillsut 10y ago
  First off, this comment should be flagged for its last paragraph Second of all, Massachusetts, yes Massachusetts, elected a Republican senator a month before the ACA went to vote, in effect cutting out the filibuster-proof 60-senate seats held by the D's at the time. If a state the last elected an R in the 1940s decided to sabotage this bill, maybe its opposition was more widespread than simply those who "cling to their guns and religion".
jawarner 10y ago
Why not both? Media marginalizes the working class, and also ML-curated social media campaigns decided the election.
Paradigma11 10y ago
As long as we do not discount the possibility that they were just a bunch of idiot rubes tricked by click bait headlines.
namlem 10y ago
People sure have been saying that a lot, and at first I believed it. However I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this isn't the case. These people do have grievances, sure, but I doubt they could actually even articulate most of these grievances, much less carefully consider solutions. The uneducated are famously easy to manipulate, and Trump just figured out how to manipulate them better than the GOP could. Same goes for the Brexiters vs the Tories. These people vote against their own interests because they don't know any better, not because they're making rational political decisions.

DiNovi 10y ago

Perhaps those grievances get obscured when people parrot the same nonsense about "elites" that the AI propaganda spouts.

AbrahamParangi 10y ago

If the options are: 1. Public (online) discourse is vulnerable to manipulation by bad-faith actors (and this manipulation is impactful on a geopolitical scale). 2. The events of the US election and Brexit were symptomatic of unrecognized problems and unheard voices. These ideas can both be true. Frankly, I find the notion that (1) isn't true too far-fetched to believe. It sounds like far too good of a business opportunity. Running ads is a valuable activity not because every person who sees the ad becomes a customer, but because in aggregate x% of viewers will consider a purchase and y% will become good customers. Cambridge Analytica sounds to me like they're just applying the standard techniques of digital content marketing to a relatively unsophisticated realm (political advertisement).

flukus 10y ago
1 has been true for a very long time, long before the internet existed, it's commonly known as astro turfing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing), the wikipedia articles cites Shakespeare is the first known (albeit fictional) example. The approach was instrumental in preventing action on climate change.
leereeves 10y ago
> Public (online) discourse is vulnerable to manipulation by bad-faith actors (and this manipulation is impactful on a geopolitical scale). This is true, but it's not limited to the right. Just one example, the Washington Post and other liberal papers reported that a Muslim-American Olympian was detained by customs. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/02/09/muslim-american-olympian-ibtihaj-muhammad-says-she-was-detained-by-u-s-customs/#comments https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/02/09... The fake part? They never mentioned that it happened in December.

nerdponx 10y ago

That is why they voted for who they voted for. But if you look at the track records of the people they voted for (in the US: the Christian Right in 2000, the Tea Party in 2012, and Trump in 2016), it's no better woth regard to privacy. And apart from some regional excepions it's not better in any other category either. If you think a vote for Paul Ryan is a vote against unaccountable power you are badly deluded.

iak8god 10y ago
> If you think a vote for Paul Ryan is a vote against unaccountable power you are badly deluded. Forget Paul Ryan. Does the billionaire President of the United States, brought to power (to almost everyone's surprise) by this populist wave, seem especially accountable to anyone? FFS, the man broke the long-standing traditions of releasing tax returns as a candidate, and has utterly failed to even give the appearance of separating himself from his business interests, and his broke working class base doesn't bat an eyelash. They're not looking for accountability. They're looking for someone to blame ("elites", "illegals", "muslims") and for someone to tell them it'll all be OK.

Mtinie 10y ago

> Maybe they were tired of being belittled by metropolitan and coastal elites ignoring those grievances and dismissing them as racists to be ignored. They could be. Or they could have been manipulated into believing that there was a cadre of elitist puppet masters out to get them. It's obvious that there are issues all across the socioeconomic spectrums, all over the planet. I'm more apt to believe that for the most part that people all over are quite similar, but propaganda triggers and psychometric targeting make it seem like we are light years apart.

skybrian 10y ago

We should distinguish between techniques used and how they're applied. It's possible to use advertising to: 1) Sell soap. 2) Let people know about a new movie. 3) Scam people out of their life savings (find people who fall for a Nigerian prince scam). 4) Own devices (phishing). 5) Swing undecided, low-information voters in an election. The techniques may be quite similar. The consequences, very different. Ad tech is powerful technology that doesn't discriminate. Large advertising networks do have content policies preventing outright scammers, phishing, and often just things they don't want on their network, but there are always new techniques. So this is just another example of why we can't have a nice libertarian-inspired Internet like we all dreamed of when the Internet was new. There are always bad guys and gray areas. Any popular service that attracts a large enough audience gets abused and the service providers inevitably end up policing it, so then they start making tough policy decisions about what's okay. (Or if they don't, customers and various interest groups will complain.)

lazaroclapp 10y ago

The grievances are real, no doubt. Are they voting for the best person to solve those issues based on an understanding of possible policies? Or because they just got advertised "Vote Trump, ban immigrants, build $20 billion walls, and then you'll have a job!" Keep in mind people voted in part based on a campaign promise to repeal "Obamacare" even when they depended on the ACA for their lives, without realizing they were one and the same. Anecdote does not data make, but there also have been a few prominent examples of families that were broken up when the U.S. citizen portion voted Trump and their relatives were then affected by the travel ban. There are real economic grievances, no one is saying there aren't. Those grievances were there the election before this one, and the one before that (2008, remember? right now the economy and employment are objectively at their best since at least that time). But there is also an ideological, cultural component, which is ripe for being modulated by propaganda. See e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/its-putins-world/513848/?utm_source=twb https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/its-put... .

badsock 10y ago

I agree 100% that the working class people in America have been screwed over. But just because they've been wronged doesn't mean that their solutions are right. Dumb ideas deserve to be attacked. Ideas that are an affront to practically every positive development that dragged us out from under the rule of the oligarchs of the 19th century and the fear-mongering ideologues of the 20th, deserve to be attacked. If that hurts the feelings of those who are promoting them, that's unfortunate, but it's the price of admission if you're trying to exert influence in the public sphere.

flukus 10y ago
> I agree 100% that the working class people in America have been screwed over. But just because they've been wronged doesn't mean that their solutions are right. The problem is that no one is putting forward better solutions. "The left" is now run by educated elites, not the working class, "the right" might not represent the working class, but at least they don't ignore them.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  A lack of better solutions of on offer (which isn't true by the way, but lets ignore that for a moment) doesn't excuse making terrible choices. The truth is that there are other solutions, but they're seen as troublesome for a number of reasons. Compounding that is the fact that people so dim they'd see value in the "solutions" offered by someone like Trump often aren't aware of the possible solutions that have been considered. It's possible to be the victim of your own desperation, which is just what such people perpetually have been throughout history. Everyone sees that kind of person as a rube, Left, Right, and Center... it's always just a fight for their hearts and minds. By the way the Right doesn't ignore the working class, but they actively hurt them. I somehow doubt that the working class wants that kind of attention.
  - flukus 10y ago
    If your attitude is to keep talking down Trump voters as being idiots don't expect any sympathy from me when Trump gets re-elected. In fact, the more you marginalise them the more radical and United they will get, before you criticize others for acting against their own self interest realise that you're doing the same. > It's possible to be the victim of your own desperation, which is just what such people perpetually have been throughout history. Everyone sees that kind of person as a rube, Left, Right, and Center... it's always just a fight for their hearts and minds. Yes, and the guy offering a bad solution looks better than the guy offering no solution.

bobdole1234 10y ago

I always find it funny when people say they're tired of being called racists. They'll bitch till they're blue in the face about how it's unfair that just because they want people like them to succeed they're called racists. I wonder what they think racism is if not that?

flukus 10y ago
I wonder what you think racism is because the people you're describing don't seem interested in discrimination based on race.
rdtsc 10y ago
> I always find it funny when people say they're tired of being called racists. You mean the people from the Middle America? Well it helps to live there for a while. I did for a about 10 years. You know what most people there don't think when they first wake up? That's right, racist thoughts. They think about getting groceries, hopefully kids did their homework, when the bills are due, why Steven is being a jerk at work and so on. They don't yawn and stretch thinking "I hope all the people with certain skin pigment different than mine fail!". > they want people like them to succeed they're called racists. I have never heard anyone say "I want people like me to succeed" based on race. Maybe I wasn't hanging out with a bad crowd. But I've heard them say "I want to succeed" or "I want my children to be successful" is that racist? I am an immigrant, is it wrong to say "I want immigrants to succeed". Am I racist now? Oh oh. > always find it funny when people say they're tired of being called racists. I am wondering. How do you expect people to respond when they are called racists. Let's imagine you walk down the street. Someone turns a corner wearing that stupid Trump hat, you yell out "You racist!". What would be a realistic positive outcome from that?
- bobdole1234 10y ago
  You honestly think that people who get called racist enough to have a recurring rant about it are talking about wanting immigrants to succeed? Or that I wander the streets calling people racist?

rdtsc 10y ago

> politically abandoned industrial workers in the US Rust Belt were just a bunch of idiot rubes tricked by click bait headlines. They had to be. Fake news, those sneaky Russians, a white-supremacist deep state conspiracy. It is what happens when people live in a bubble. They can pretend nothing else exists. Facebook posts all come from the same group of friends, those who don't agree are unfriended, and so on. News channel all pump the same reassuring message about an almost certain win and even show a map with all states filled in blue. Until of course the bubble pops then it just becomes too much. There was certainly a surprise element but I am surprised how surprised some people were and how they overnight went from stoic intellectuals lecturing those Trump rednecks about integrity of our electoral system, and how they better not riot and get angry and agree with the results of the election, to irrational and angry conspiracy theorists. > most clearly with pro-Trump campaigners and programmers who carefully adjusted the timing of content production during the debates, strategically colonized pro-Clinton hashtags, and then disabled activities after Election Day,” That was interesting. The most visible example is probably "Fake News" it was a term appropriated and used to label mainstream media like CNN, NBC, NYT and WaPo. It had gotten to a point where Washington Post sent out an explicit request for everyone to please stop using that term because it has been taken over so to speak. > According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads reminding certain selected black voters of Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘super predator’ line. It targeted Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with messages about the Clinton Foundation’s troubles in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.’” One thing I noticed Hillary organized a Jay-Z concert. I guess she heard that Black people like rap and paid Jay-Z to throw the n-word at them a few times. What an awkward way to connect. A while back I managed to find a speech Trump gave to a mostly Black community and he didn't do half bad. It was a very small gathering. It was probably never going to be a community that would vote for him as a block like they did for Obama. But at least he tried to talk about inner cities, inequality, crime, safety, jobs, education. > Political analysts in the Clinton campaign, who were basing their tactics on traditional polling methods, laughed when Trump scheduled campaign events in the so-called blue wall -- a group of states that includes Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and has traditionally fallen to Democrats. I think there is a bit of the oscillation happening. Trump went from an arrogant stupid idiot to this super cunning and smart villain who used those evil AI bots to win. Why didn't Hillary try that same software and those same bots? Guessing by implication is because her campaign was honest and they played by the rules.

mirimir 10y ago

The concern here isn't about who won, in the UK or the US. The concern is about personalized propaganda. There's nothing new about propaganda. There's nothing new about astroturfing. There's nothing new about targeted advertising. What's new is how effectively Cambridge Analytics combined and leveraged them.

gydfi 10y ago
Then why is all the discussion in terms of who did win? People who don't like the result are "blaming" this phenomenon, without regard for the fact that this is something that everyone is presumably doing. When Obama won, I seem to remember a lot of people around here praising the success of his social media strategy.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Yes, after Obama won, there was talk of using his social network to help drive his agenda. That didn't work out so well, I think. But the Brexit and Trump teams did a far better job of it. So yes, we have an arms race, and those with the best AI will become the power brokers. I like the analogy to high-frequency trading. Neither market valuation nor democratic process are very meaningful when driven by machine learning.
  - gydfi 10y ago
    I'm not convinced that Trump had a better social media operation, just that he had a more compelling message. Stuff like /r/the_donald grew organically, people devoted thousands of hours of their own time to Trump memes, because they were inspired by what Trump had to say. Hillary's support was approximately as widespread, but less deep. Trump's online rallies were bigger for the same reason his real world rallies were bigger.

bsder 10y ago

> Does it occur o anyone they may have actually had real grievances against globalization? Your assessment might hold water except that they also sent back the congressmen responsible for the situation in record numbers. So, even if I give them that they believed Trump was their champion, what are we to make of the fact that they sent everybody else responsible for the situation back? > Maybe they were tired of being belittled by metropolitan and coastal elites ignoring those grievances and dismissing them as racists to be ignored. Yet they bitch, complain and fight when said coastal elites attempt to help things: see Obamacare. Even a SINGLE moderate Republican senator driven by moderate constituents would have made the ACA a lauded national accomplishment and enabled compromise instead of a partisan war. There wasn't a SINGLE moderate Republican senator in the entire batch. Not ... one ... You can't fight people when they attempt to help and then complain when they give up and tell you to get stuffed and go die in a fire. And, from what I can tell, the ACA was the breaking point where the left finally threw in the towel that there was any working with the right and that they should simply be left to rot. > Ok, so people living outside major cities in UK voting against centralization of unaccountable power in the EU and unemployed, politically abandoned industrial workers in the US Rust Belt were just a bunch of idiot rubes tricked by click bait headlines. Pretty much. Whenever I sit down an talk to people to explain the ACA stuff, I invariably get "Well, nobody ever told me that." Of course they didn't. Most things in the ACA are driven by the fundamental choices that most people agree with. If you agree with no exclusions for preexisting conditions, then you need to amortize the sick over the well. That implies sign up periods and getting the healthy to sign on when they really don't want to. etc. Unfortunately, that's too subtle an argument to get through a wall of interference of "Obama's a muslim and wants to oppress Christians! They wanna take arrr gunzzzz! Mexicans took all arrr jerbs!"

stillsut 10y ago
First off, this comment should be flagged for its last paragraph Second of all, Massachusetts, yes Massachusetts, elected a Republican senator a month before the ACA went to vote, in effect cutting out the filibuster-proof 60-senate seats held by the D's at the time. If a state the last elected an R in the 1940s decided to sabotage this bill, maybe its opposition was more widespread than simply those who "cling to their guns and religion".

jawarner 10y ago

Why not both? Media marginalizes the working class, and also ML-curated social media campaigns decided the election.

Paradigma11 10y ago

As long as we do not discount the possibility that they were just a bunch of idiot rubes tricked by click bait headlines.

namlem 10y ago

People sure have been saying that a lot, and at first I believed it. However I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this isn't the case. These people do have grievances, sure, but I doubt they could actually even articulate most of these grievances, much less carefully consider solutions. The uneducated are famously easy to manipulate, and Trump just figured out how to manipulate them better than the GOP could. Same goes for the Brexiters vs the Tories. These people vote against their own interests because they don't know any better, not because they're making rational political decisions.