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The part where the author tries to tie Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the user-hostile web is bonkers. People, you have to understand this: There

The part where the author tries to tie Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the user-hostile web is bonkers. People, you have to understand this: There exists a large number of others out there who desperately want government reformed, want more localized control over their lives, and who voted accordingly. It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth! The rest of the article was well-intentioned, but somehow just a bit off. We can't go back to 1999 or 1993, but we can limit the walled gardens and censorship if we want to. But this is important: It's not the freedom-minded people who want to shut down free speech or filter and censor, it is the dyed-in-the-wool Marxist hardliners and the corporatists.

lrc 9y ago
It is not as if forces hostile to Trump/Brexit were innocent of buying analytical data. The recent Senate hearings on Russian ad-buys were strangely incurious about, say, purchases from China. Were there any? Would they tell us?
- nielsole 9y ago
  Last time I checked, China was roughly following the policy of "leave our internals to us and we will leave your internals to you". Are there know cases where China recently meddled with foreign elections/governments?
  - Feniks 9y ago
    Taiwan maybe, but China focuses more on good trade relations than political ideology or ethics.
dudul 9y ago
> The part where the author tries to tie Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the user-hostile web is bonkers. I also thought it was pretty weak of the author to shoehorn these things in his essay. All politicians/parties use "big data" for their campaigns, don't you think the democrats were doing the same thing? And since he's from France, he conveniently forgot to mention the Macron campaign last spring. This topic is too important to point fingers like that. I agree with everything else in the post though.
pjc50 9y ago
Well, it's both: people thought the whole "take back control" slogan was great, along with the "£350m for the NHS" slogan. It's just that the slogans are empty and there's no answer to the question "control of what, and by whom?" Or any other question related to how this is actually going to work. The problem of unachievable slogans is hardly a new one but it has got much worse lately. Injecting more lies into the political process is not going to improve this.
iamcasen 9y ago
"died-in-the-wool Marxist hardliners and corporatists" You really trying to equate Marxists and corporatists??? Dude...
- guelo 9y ago
  Especially when what they really voted for was cutting the corporatists' taxes and regulations. It is one of the greatest tricks of modern propaganda that the super-pro-corporate parties have turned around the hate of corporations onto the, umm, less-pro-corporate party.
  - vim_wannabe 9y ago
    One party for the corporations, the other for multi-nationals.
- mturmon 9y ago
  Indeed, the notion in 2017 of a significant set of "died-in-the-wool Marxist hardliners" seems like a fantasy.
knowaveragejoe 9y ago
I think you are giving those folks too much credit. Few of the people who voted for Trump could coherently explain the problems you have mentioned, how they realistically impact their life, and how Trump and his ilk would plan to solve them. Instead, inch-deep reasoning and soundbites prevail, and much of it boils down to conspiracy theories. They are happy to wield the power of the state and employ centralized control of things when it suits their pet issues all the same. Donald Trump represents a net intrusion of government into our personal lives and businesses.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Jonathan Albright: "Who Hacked the Election? Ad Tech did. Through “Fake News,” Identity Resolution and Hyper-Personalization" The data I present here suggests that before we keep pointing fingers at specific countries and tweeting about companies “hacking the election,” as well as to solve the scourge of “fake news,” it might be good to look inward. By this, I mean we should start the quest for transparency in politics with a few firms based in New York City and Silicon Valley. https://medium.com/tow-center/who-hacked-the-election-43d4019f705f https://medium.com/tow-center/who-hacked-the-election-43d401... Albright is an ex-Googler and director of a journalism centre at Columbia University.
addicted 9y ago
"It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth!" You're right. That 350mn pounds/week for the NHS is right around the corner. Brexit was nothing but a huge con. I'll agree with you on Donald Trump. His terribleness was pretty obvious and open right from the beginning. Nothing we've seen from him wasn't evident during or before his campaign.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "People, you have to understand this: There exists a large number of others out there who desperately want government reformed, want more localized control over their lives, and who voted accordingly. It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth!" Thank you for taking time to consider the effects of media spin and not take everything you read at face value. If more people made the same effort we'd be a lot better off.
- hehheh 9y ago
  If media spin can affect people, why couldn't a corporation or foreign government do the same? I don't understand why the facts that that a large number of people want government reform and that corporate and government forces were spending money to influence the election cannot exist side by side.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    > "If media spin can affect people, why couldn't a corporation or foreign government do the same?" They can. Media spin includes the spin driven by governments, that's why spin doctors exist: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/spin-doctor https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/spin-do... When I say media spin, I'm referring to lies and half-truths spread through the media. I'm not suggesting it has to be the media owners that are doing the spinning. > "I don't understand why the facts that that a large number of people want government reform and that corporate and government forces were spending money to influence the election cannot exist side by side." They can. However, what's not commonly considered is that people may have been acting in their own self-interest. I'm not from the US, and I would never have voted for Trump. However, I can see how the media has portrayed Trump voters, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise that the media portrayal is missing the wood for the trees. The main options commonly given for why people voted for Trump is that either they were manipulated by the media or they share some of Trump's negative personality traits. However, if you look at polls about what people care about in an election, the same thing comes out top time and time again. The economy. It seems that many people don't follow politics that closely, but what they do understand is that it has an impact on the economy, and they care about jobs. So let's look at this from a purely economic perspective. When faced with a choice between Trump and Clinton, putting personality aside, are there any economic reasons why someone might have chosen Trump over Clinton? The main message I hope to get across is that if the media you consume is conveniently packaging a set of memes about a subject, you can be almost certain they're missing out on details. Real life is messy and chaotic, boiling down the motives of the general population to easy to consume soundbites is unlikely to accurately capture the thoughts of hundreds of millions of people. That's why it's useful to look beyond the headlines, and look to understand those you disagree with. Partisan biases weaken the health of public discourse. Were there people who voted a certain way because they were manipulated into it? I don't doubt it. However, that's not the full picture.
tstactplsignore 9y ago
>It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth! Don't we objectively know this is false? You can dispute the size of the effect, but both Russians and corporations absolutely ran large targeted misinformation and propaganda campaigns for the 2016 election, taking advantage of what you could call the user-hostile web. The intelligence communities, congress, and big tech companies all agree on this now... Your distortion may be a bit more qualified than Donald Trump's daily fabrications, but it still intends to deceive on what is an objective fact all the same.
- weirdstuff 9y ago
  Let's get real. They weren't large campaigns; Russian firms/orgs (RT, really) hardly spent anything! So far the disclosed numbers are less than a 1/4 million; as opposed to the roughly $6.8 spent domestically. Billions and billions spent by U.S. actors as opposed to less than a million spent by Russian actors! Russian efforts are immaterial and likely were intended for commercial reasons rather than political ones. (RT wants views!) I'm getting tired of this obtuseness. Russia had negligible impact and there's nothing out there showing they did. So far what we have is speculation and finger pointing like I've never witnessed post-election. The disastrous 2016 election is just dragginggggggg outtttt foreverrrrr.
  - gammarator 9y ago
    It's clear based on the content of the released ads that Russian goals included increasing the polarization of the US around issues of race, politics, gun control, etc. It's not necessary for these ads to have decided the presidential election for us to oppose that interference in our civic life. And it's made possible by the availability of highly targeted advertising.
  - tstactplsignore 9y ago
    Isn't that figure just for promoted content on major websites? The vast majority of their propaganda campaign was through the use of bot accounts and fake profiles, and that was almost certainly the most effective content.
anigbrowl 9y ago
And you think voting for Trump or Brexit will deliver that? XD XD XD Sorry for being so blunt, but you got played. I remember living in the UK prior to deeper EU integration, and it sucked. Every country had its own standards for modems and used it as a protectionist tool to keep 'foreign' technology out or at least much more expensive. You didn't have real local control, you had much more centralized control that was not structured in the interests of the general public. It was a great number for the politicians: blame anything you don't like on Brussels (even if it is self-evidently good for consumers), take credit for anything you can hang a patriotic label on, and centralize as much as possible so the people in the national government can be the big fish in the small pond, while pretending to be the heroic defenders of the pond against foreign sharks. you see the same thing in the US - conservative politicians rail against 'big government in Washington DC' while simultaneously passing legislation that limits the ability of municipalities to govern themselves, eg by creating public fiberoptic networks or setting policies that give people more rights than the people in the state capitol wish. I could also make critiques of liberal politicians who to some extent do the same thing at the city vs. the neighborhood level; I don't want to be partisan. But if you voted for Brexit or Trump because you believed you, the little person with no political power, would be better off then you have been fleeced and told that your political enemies are attacking you with a wind machine. It's not the freedom-minded people who want to shut down free speech Oh yes, those nice freedom-minded people who also want to engage in ethnic cleansing and have neo-nazis on speed dial. It's freedom for themselves, not you. See for yourself: create a few sockpuppets, go to /pol/ or wherever you like to hang out, and try expressing some polite mild opinions out of step with the rest of the forum. PS look into how Cambridge Analytica operates and tell me these people are trying to maximize your freedom. To them you're just a vote and a voice to be harvested. You'll probably hear more about this in days to come as Robert Mercer is frantically re-organizing his financial holdings.
freeflight 9y ago
> It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth! As much as I agree with that statement I don't think it's necessarily framed like that in the essay but is rather used as a case in point example with quite some validity. Social media and the whole "attention economy" have become quite influential without people even noticing that influence. This might just be the culmination of a trend we've been seeing for quite a while already. Afaik Obamas campaign also was quite big data and social media driven, but when he did it that was somehow something "positive" to show how "in touch with the Millenials" he is.
tim333 9y ago
>The part ... Brexit and the election of Donald Trump ... is bonkers. For me that was the good part. I like the web, actually like facebook and don't give a damn that people collect data on me to try to show me ads that uBlock then blocks. Having whole countries screwed by idiot politics however is a problem.

lrc 9y ago

It is not as if forces hostile to Trump/Brexit were innocent of buying analytical data. The recent Senate hearings on Russian ad-buys were strangely incurious about, say, purchases from China. Were there any? Would they tell us?

nielsole 9y ago
Last time I checked, China was roughly following the policy of "leave our internals to us and we will leave your internals to you". Are there know cases where China recently meddled with foreign elections/governments?
- Feniks 9y ago
  Taiwan maybe, but China focuses more on good trade relations than political ideology or ethics.

dudul 9y ago

> The part where the author tries to tie Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the user-hostile web is bonkers. I also thought it was pretty weak of the author to shoehorn these things in his essay. All politicians/parties use "big data" for their campaigns, don't you think the democrats were doing the same thing? And since he's from France, he conveniently forgot to mention the Macron campaign last spring. This topic is too important to point fingers like that. I agree with everything else in the post though.

pjc50 9y ago

Well, it's both: people thought the whole "take back control" slogan was great, along with the "£350m for the NHS" slogan. It's just that the slogans are empty and there's no answer to the question "control of what, and by whom?" Or any other question related to how this is actually going to work. The problem of unachievable slogans is hardly a new one but it has got much worse lately. Injecting more lies into the political process is not going to improve this.

iamcasen 9y ago

"died-in-the-wool Marxist hardliners and corporatists" You really trying to equate Marxists and corporatists??? Dude...

guelo 9y ago
Especially when what they really voted for was cutting the corporatists' taxes and regulations. It is one of the greatest tricks of modern propaganda that the super-pro-corporate parties have turned around the hate of corporations onto the, umm, less-pro-corporate party.
- vim_wannabe 9y ago
  One party for the corporations, the other for multi-nationals.
mturmon 9y ago
Indeed, the notion in 2017 of a significant set of "died-in-the-wool Marxist hardliners" seems like a fantasy.

knowaveragejoe 9y ago

I think you are giving those folks too much credit. Few of the people who voted for Trump could coherently explain the problems you have mentioned, how they realistically impact their life, and how Trump and his ilk would plan to solve them. Instead, inch-deep reasoning and soundbites prevail, and much of it boils down to conspiracy theories. They are happy to wield the power of the state and employ centralized control of things when it suits their pet issues all the same. Donald Trump represents a net intrusion of government into our personal lives and businesses.

dredmorbius 9y ago

Jonathan Albright: "Who Hacked the Election? Ad Tech did. Through “Fake News,” Identity Resolution and Hyper-Personalization" The data I present here suggests that before we keep pointing fingers at specific countries and tweeting about companies “hacking the election,” as well as to solve the scourge of “fake news,” it might be good to look inward. By this, I mean we should start the quest for transparency in politics with a few firms based in New York City and Silicon Valley. https://medium.com/tow-center/who-hacked-the-election-43d4019f705f https://medium.com/tow-center/who-hacked-the-election-43d401... Albright is an ex-Googler and director of a journalism centre at Columbia University.

addicted 9y ago

"It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth!" You're right. That 350mn pounds/week for the NHS is right around the corner. Brexit was nothing but a huge con. I'll agree with you on Donald Trump. His terribleness was pretty obvious and open right from the beginning. Nothing we've seen from him wasn't evident during or before his campaign.

ZenoArrow 9y ago

> "People, you have to understand this: There exists a large number of others out there who desperately want government reformed, want more localized control over their lives, and who voted accordingly. It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth!" Thank you for taking time to consider the effects of media spin and not take everything you read at face value. If more people made the same effort we'd be a lot better off.

hehheh 9y ago
If media spin can affect people, why couldn't a corporation or foreign government do the same? I don't understand why the facts that that a large number of people want government reform and that corporate and government forces were spending money to influence the election cannot exist side by side.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "If media spin can affect people, why couldn't a corporation or foreign government do the same?" They can. Media spin includes the spin driven by governments, that's why spin doctors exist: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/spin-doctor https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/spin-do... When I say media spin, I'm referring to lies and half-truths spread through the media. I'm not suggesting it has to be the media owners that are doing the spinning. > "I don't understand why the facts that that a large number of people want government reform and that corporate and government forces were spending money to influence the election cannot exist side by side." They can. However, what's not commonly considered is that people may have been acting in their own self-interest. I'm not from the US, and I would never have voted for Trump. However, I can see how the media has portrayed Trump voters, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise that the media portrayal is missing the wood for the trees. The main options commonly given for why people voted for Trump is that either they were manipulated by the media or they share some of Trump's negative personality traits. However, if you look at polls about what people care about in an election, the same thing comes out top time and time again. The economy. It seems that many people don't follow politics that closely, but what they do understand is that it has an impact on the economy, and they care about jobs. So let's look at this from a purely economic perspective. When faced with a choice between Trump and Clinton, putting personality aside, are there any economic reasons why someone might have chosen Trump over Clinton? The main message I hope to get across is that if the media you consume is conveniently packaging a set of memes about a subject, you can be almost certain they're missing out on details. Real life is messy and chaotic, boiling down the motives of the general population to easy to consume soundbites is unlikely to accurately capture the thoughts of hundreds of millions of people. That's why it's useful to look beyond the headlines, and look to understand those you disagree with. Partisan biases weaken the health of public discourse. Were there people who voted a certain way because they were manipulated into it? I don't doubt it. However, that's not the full picture.

tstactplsignore 9y ago

>It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth! Don't we objectively know this is false? You can dispute the size of the effect, but both Russians and corporations absolutely ran large targeted misinformation and propaganda campaigns for the 2016 election, taking advantage of what you could call the user-hostile web. The intelligence communities, congress, and big tech companies all agree on this now... Your distortion may be a bit more qualified than Donald Trump's daily fabrications, but it still intends to deceive on what is an objective fact all the same.

weirdstuff 9y ago
Let's get real. They weren't large campaigns; Russian firms/orgs (RT, really) hardly spent anything! So far the disclosed numbers are less than a 1/4 million; as opposed to the roughly $6.8 spent domestically. Billions and billions spent by U.S. actors as opposed to less than a million spent by Russian actors! Russian efforts are immaterial and likely were intended for commercial reasons rather than political ones. (RT wants views!) I'm getting tired of this obtuseness. Russia had negligible impact and there's nothing out there showing they did. So far what we have is speculation and finger pointing like I've never witnessed post-election. The disastrous 2016 election is just dragginggggggg outtttt foreverrrrr.
- gammarator 9y ago
  It's clear based on the content of the released ads that Russian goals included increasing the polarization of the US around issues of race, politics, gun control, etc. It's not necessary for these ads to have decided the presidential election for us to oppose that interference in our civic life. And it's made possible by the availability of highly targeted advertising.
- tstactplsignore 9y ago
  Isn't that figure just for promoted content on major websites? The vast majority of their propaganda campaign was through the use of bot accounts and fake profiles, and that was almost certainly the most effective content.

anigbrowl 9y ago

And you think voting for Trump or Brexit will deliver that? XD XD XD Sorry for being so blunt, but you got played. I remember living in the UK prior to deeper EU integration, and it sucked. Every country had its own standards for modems and used it as a protectionist tool to keep 'foreign' technology out or at least much more expensive. You didn't have real local control, you had much more centralized control that was not structured in the interests of the general public. It was a great number for the politicians: blame anything you don't like on Brussels (even if it is self-evidently good for consumers), take credit for anything you can hang a patriotic label on, and centralize as much as possible so the people in the national government can be the big fish in the small pond, while pretending to be the heroic defenders of the pond against foreign sharks. you see the same thing in the US - conservative politicians rail against 'big government in Washington DC' while simultaneously passing legislation that limits the ability of municipalities to govern themselves, eg by creating public fiberoptic networks or setting policies that give people more rights than the people in the state capitol wish. I could also make critiques of liberal politicians who to some extent do the same thing at the city vs. the neighborhood level; I don't want to be partisan. But if you voted for Brexit or Trump because you believed you, the little person with no political power, would be better off then you have been fleeced and told that your political enemies are attacking you with a wind machine. It's not the freedom-minded people who want to shut down free speech Oh yes, those nice freedom-minded people who also want to engage in ethnic cleansing and have neo-nazis on speed dial. It's freedom for themselves, not you. See for yourself: create a few sockpuppets, go to /pol/ or wherever you like to hang out, and try expressing some polite mild opinions out of step with the rest of the forum. PS look into how Cambridge Analytica operates and tell me these people are trying to maximize your freedom. To them you're just a vote and a voice to be harvested. You'll probably hear more about this in days to come as Robert Mercer is frantically re-organizing his financial holdings.

freeflight 9y ago

> It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth! As much as I agree with that statement I don't think it's necessarily framed like that in the essay but is rather used as a case in point example with quite some validity. Social media and the whole "attention economy" have become quite influential without people even noticing that influence. This might just be the culmination of a trend we've been seeing for quite a while already. Afaik Obamas campaign also was quite big data and social media driven, but when he did it that was somehow something "positive" to show how "in touch with the Millenials" he is.

tim333 9y ago

>The part ... Brexit and the election of Donald Trump ... is bonkers. For me that was the good part. I like the web, actually like facebook and don't give a damn that people collect data on me to try to show me ads that uBlock then blocks. Having whole countries screwed by idiot politics however is a problem.