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Nobody, in any significant numbers, has ever claimed or believed that there were direct manipulations of vote counts. This is a pure strawman. Saying the Russia

by gipp 10y ago

Nobody, in any significant numbers, has ever claimed or believed that there were direct manipulations of vote counts. This is a pure strawman. Saying the Russians "hacked the election" is just a sloppy shorthand for the, at this point well-established, attacks on the process that did occur. Nobody is intending it to mean vote-count changes.

rhino369 10y ago
It's sloppy biased shorthand. How you summarize things has huge consequences to how people think about things. "Hacked the election" makes it seem like the results are illegitimate. Informed people know the difference, but the average person is watching like 5 minutes of a news a day and reads the headlines and maybe the lead. For a profession that is so cautious it'll throw the world "alleged" before someone who is caught on camera murdering someone, I think it's a pretty big sign of some bias. I'm sure the right wing bias'd papers have found a term that minimizes the hacking too.
- falcolas 10y ago
  I have to ask - if the information presented to the public about the election candidates was false, how can we expect that the public made a reasonably informed choice about those candidates? Strikes me as a perfectly valid definition of a hack; a social engineering hack, but a hack all the same. We see those all the time in our own life; we call it fraud or failure when it succeeds, and attempt to roll back to a known good state. Why is an election different?
  - rhino369 10y ago
    Our system has to deal with mistruths because there is no way of filtering out lies. We do this by allowing all opinions and positions to make their case and letting the people decide. Also, the "hacking" actually exposed true information about the candidate. Which makes this an even harder situation. Is the election illegitimate because the people got to learn MORE, true information? There is a clear and concise way of stating this. Russia attempted to influence our election. I don't think redefining releasing information as hacking really helps anyone understand this. Did Entertainment Tonight hack the election by releasing the pussy tape?
narrowrail 10y ago
That's the point though, this 'sloppy shorthand' distorts the reality. Words have meaning, and we should use the words that best describe what happened which is the DNC was hacked and all their dirty laundry was aired.
RodericDay 10y ago
> Nobody, in any significant numbers, has ever claimed or believed that there were direct manipulations of vote counts. Huh? https://today.yougov.com/news/2016/12/27/belief-conspiracies-largely-depends-political-iden/ https://today.yougov.com/news/2016/12/27/belief-conspiracies... > Half of Clinton’s voters think Russia even hacked the Election Day votes (only 9% of Trump voters give that any credibility at all). Six in ten Trump voters believe there were millions of illegal votes cast on election day. One in four Clinton voters agree with that, though it’s likely that the illegal votes Clinton voters think were cast were quite different from the illegal votes Trump voters see. In an Economist/YouGov Poll conducted a few days after the election, just 2% of those who voted on Election Day said they saw any ineligible voters trying to cast a ballot (and there was almost no difference in the proportion of Clinton supporters and Trump supporters saying this).
xienze 10y ago
> Nobody, in any significant numbers, has ever claimed or believed that there were direct manipulations of vote counts. They don't need to. But the choice of phrase is important. What "hacked the election" does is make people draw false inferences without actually saying something like "they hacked the ballot box." The media knows people consume information in bites and rarely deep dive, and "hacked the election" is the perfect way to make people think the "election was hacked" when the truth of the matter is "the DNC was hacked". And if we really want to get technical, the "hacking" was to guess that John Podesta's email password was "password" -- but by glossing over those details the average person is lead to believe that some elite team of Russian hackers slaved away for months or years figuring out how to discredit the DNC by exposing their own misdeeds.
trueSlav 10y ago
Attacks on the process... You mean how the lefties are butthurt and super mad on Wikileaks because "they didn't get dirt on Trump too :("

by gipp 10y ago

rhino369 10y ago

It's sloppy biased shorthand. How you summarize things has huge consequences to how people think about things. "Hacked the election" makes it seem like the results are illegitimate. Informed people know the difference, but the average person is watching like 5 minutes of a news a day and reads the headlines and maybe the lead. For a profession that is so cautious it'll throw the world "alleged" before someone who is caught on camera murdering someone, I think it's a pretty big sign of some bias. I'm sure the right wing bias'd papers have found a term that minimizes the hacking too.

falcolas 10y ago
I have to ask - if the information presented to the public about the election candidates was false, how can we expect that the public made a reasonably informed choice about those candidates? Strikes me as a perfectly valid definition of a hack; a social engineering hack, but a hack all the same. We see those all the time in our own life; we call it fraud or failure when it succeeds, and attempt to roll back to a known good state. Why is an election different?
- rhino369 10y ago
  Our system has to deal with mistruths because there is no way of filtering out lies. We do this by allowing all opinions and positions to make their case and letting the people decide. Also, the "hacking" actually exposed true information about the candidate. Which makes this an even harder situation. Is the election illegitimate because the people got to learn MORE, true information? There is a clear and concise way of stating this. Russia attempted to influence our election. I don't think redefining releasing information as hacking really helps anyone understand this. Did Entertainment Tonight hack the election by releasing the pussy tape?

narrowrail 10y ago

That's the point though, this 'sloppy shorthand' distorts the reality. Words have meaning, and we should use the words that best describe what happened which is the DNC was hacked and all their dirty laundry was aired.

RodericDay 10y ago

> Nobody, in any significant numbers, has ever claimed or believed that there were direct manipulations of vote counts. Huh? https://today.yougov.com/news/2016/12/27/belief-conspiracies-largely-depends-political-iden/ https://today.yougov.com/news/2016/12/27/belief-conspiracies... > Half of Clinton’s voters think Russia even hacked the Election Day votes (only 9% of Trump voters give that any credibility at all). Six in ten Trump voters believe there were millions of illegal votes cast on election day. One in four Clinton voters agree with that, though it’s likely that the illegal votes Clinton voters think were cast were quite different from the illegal votes Trump voters see. In an Economist/YouGov Poll conducted a few days after the election, just 2% of those who voted on Election Day said they saw any ineligible voters trying to cast a ballot (and there was almost no difference in the proportion of Clinton supporters and Trump supporters saying this).

xienze 10y ago

> Nobody, in any significant numbers, has ever claimed or believed that there were direct manipulations of vote counts. They don't need to. But the choice of phrase is important. What "hacked the election" does is make people draw false inferences without actually saying something like "they hacked the ballot box." The media knows people consume information in bites and rarely deep dive, and "hacked the election" is the perfect way to make people think the "election was hacked" when the truth of the matter is "the DNC was hacked". And if we really want to get technical, the "hacking" was to guess that John Podesta's email password was "password" -- but by glossing over those details the average person is lead to believe that some elite team of Russian hackers slaved away for months or years figuring out how to discredit the DNC by exposing their own misdeeds.

trueSlav 10y ago

Attacks on the process... You mean how the lefties are butthurt and super mad on Wikileaks because "they didn't get dirt on Trump too :("