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Silicon Valley Can’t Destroy Democracy Without Our Help

26 points by SirLJ 9y ago

godzillabrennus 9y ago
Wasn’t Russia responsible for spending $100k or so on ads on Facebook? Didn’t Hillary spend $1B on her media buy? This reads like clickbait to me. I didn’t vote for Trump but he’s demonstrably reducing government size and put a strict constitutionalist on the Supreme Court. The media needs to stop with sensationalist headlines like Russia alone caused Hillary to lose.
- gipp 9y ago
  I feel like it's a law on HN that the first comments criticizing the article are always actually in complete agreement with the article, and either didn't read it or completely misread it. Every time, that happens.
- BayesStreet 9y ago
  The irony of this quote in the intro is palpable. "They reveal a society that is painfully divided, gullible to misinformation, dazzled by sensationalism, ..."
- daveguy 9y ago
  Well, considering $1 spent on a US election by a foreign power is illegal the comparative ad buys of the campaigns themselves aren't relevant. Also, the 0.1MM estimate from Facebook is a severe underestimate. Twitter id'ed ~20x that.
  - adventured 9y ago
    There's also nothing new about that. The 1996 Clinton Campaign broke the law by illegally taking piles of foreign Chinese money. The foreign money scandals have followed the Clintons for decades, which has seen several of the money runners arrested. Naturally nobody on the left has ever cared about any of that.
- adventured 9y ago
  It's a combination of clickbait and residual election rage (blame offloading). Hillary spent ~$2.2 billion on her total campaign start to finish and ran one of the worst campaigns in modern US history. She lost a very easy state like Wisconsin, a semi-easy state like Pennsylvania and nearly lost New Hampshire and Minnesota (states Obama took soundly). Trump spent a third as much across his entire Presidential campaign. There's definitely some democracy destruction going on alright, with Russia and Silicon Valley low on the list of issues. Russia has been tampering with US elections as long as the US has been tampering with Russian elections, it goes back to before WW2. Nothing is going to stop world powers from messing with each other. The US has been screwing with Putin's Russia when it comes to elections, since he has been in power. That's not to ignore Putin's authoritarian rule or its abuses, it's a fact of what the US has been doing for many decades: aggressive meddling in Russian politics. Why wouldn't Russia meddle in US politics? It's fair game. The hysteria is about control and regulation, it's not about $100k in Russia ad spend, that's the boogeyman necessary to implement the changes.
theyregreat 9y ago
Scapegoats abound. It’s never the readers’ personal responsibility for retweeting conspiracy theories, The Onion as fact or PR-manufactured articles. Maybe NYT trying to get the InfoWars demographic / fly-over country back on their side?
throw2016 9y ago
You can't 'protect' democracy by dismissing the electorate as mindless idiots. Either you take the position adults can make up their own minds or you dismantle democracy and media as voters are easily influenced and cannot be trusted. There is no literate argument to be found here. This paranoia is now reaching hysteria, lies are repeated without any sort of evidence as fact and all sorts of dubious agendas are being played out under pretense. No one talking about this will admit they are personally influenced but are happy to patronize everyone else.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
  >Either you take the position adults can make up their own minds or you dismantle democracy and media as voters are easily influenced and cannot be trusted. Reducing the solution set to a binary is emblematic of the problems of the US political system. Another possible solution is to increase awareness of cognitive biases in decision making and perhaps improving our educational system by elevating the importance of critical analysis. However, I steer towards the latter of your proposed solutions. That such a large % of the voting public gets its news from facebook is depressing.
sien 9y ago
When George W Bush won the election it was all the fault of Fox News and right wing radio. Now that HRC lost the fault now lies allegedly with social media and evil foreigners. It's like people blaming comic books, TV, rock music and video games for what they see as the failings of youth. Acknowledging that the Democrats chose poor candidates in Gore and Clinton and that winning three Presidential terms in a row is hard is apparently harder than blaming people for voting the 'wrong' way on some new media development.
- akira2501 9y ago
  > When George W Bush won the election it was all the fault of Fox News and right wing radio. I was pretty sure we're laying that one at the feet of the Florida State Supreme Court.
devinhelton 9y ago
In the last few months of the presidential campaign, a BuzzFeed analysis concluded, fake news stories got more Facebook engagement than the most widely read stories from major news outlets. Isn't there a problem with this Buzzfeed analysis in that it assumes that the engagement for fake news is actually real? We know that a ton of the engagement for fake news is itself faked for ad fraud purposes -- http://sadbottrue.com/article/profitable-info-dump/ http://sadbottrue.com/article/profitable-info-dump/ -- so I'm not sure what we can learn from the raw numbers that Buzzfeed had access to.

26 points by SirLJ 9y ago

Wasn’t Russia responsible for spending $100k or so on ads on Facebook? Didn’t Hillary spend $1B on her media buy? This reads like clickbait to me. I didn’t vote for Trump but he’s demonstrably reducing government size and put a strict constitutionalist on the Supreme Court. The media needs to stop with sensationalist headlines like Russia alone caused Hillary to lose.

gipp 9y ago
I feel like it's a law on HN that the first comments criticizing the article are always actually in complete agreement with the article, and either didn't read it or completely misread it. Every time, that happens.
BayesStreet 9y ago
The irony of this quote in the intro is palpable. "They reveal a society that is painfully divided, gullible to misinformation, dazzled by sensationalism, ..."
daveguy 9y ago
Well, considering $1 spent on a US election by a foreign power is illegal the comparative ad buys of the campaigns themselves aren't relevant. Also, the 0.1MM estimate from Facebook is a severe underestimate. Twitter id'ed ~20x that.
- adventured 9y ago
  There's also nothing new about that. The 1996 Clinton Campaign broke the law by illegally taking piles of foreign Chinese money. The foreign money scandals have followed the Clintons for decades, which has seen several of the money runners arrested. Naturally nobody on the left has ever cared about any of that.
adventured 9y ago
It's a combination of clickbait and residual election rage (blame offloading). Hillary spent ~$2.2 billion on her total campaign start to finish and ran one of the worst campaigns in modern US history. She lost a very easy state like Wisconsin, a semi-easy state like Pennsylvania and nearly lost New Hampshire and Minnesota (states Obama took soundly). Trump spent a third as much across his entire Presidential campaign. There's definitely some democracy destruction going on alright, with Russia and Silicon Valley low on the list of issues. Russia has been tampering with US elections as long as the US has been tampering with Russian elections, it goes back to before WW2. Nothing is going to stop world powers from messing with each other. The US has been screwing with Putin's Russia when it comes to elections, since he has been in power. That's not to ignore Putin's authoritarian rule or its abuses, it's a fact of what the US has been doing for many decades: aggressive meddling in Russian politics. Why wouldn't Russia meddle in US politics? It's fair game. The hysteria is about control and regulation, it's not about $100k in Russia ad spend, that's the boogeyman necessary to implement the changes.

theyregreat 9y ago

Scapegoats abound. It’s never the readers’ personal responsibility for retweeting conspiracy theories, The Onion as fact or PR-manufactured articles. Maybe NYT trying to get the InfoWars demographic / fly-over country back on their side?

throw2016 9y ago

You can't 'protect' democracy by dismissing the electorate as mindless idiots. Either you take the position adults can make up their own minds or you dismantle democracy and media as voters are easily influenced and cannot be trusted. There is no literate argument to be found here. This paranoia is now reaching hysteria, lies are repeated without any sort of evidence as fact and all sorts of dubious agendas are being played out under pretense. No one talking about this will admit they are personally influenced but are happy to patronize everyone else.

FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
>Either you take the position adults can make up their own minds or you dismantle democracy and media as voters are easily influenced and cannot be trusted. Reducing the solution set to a binary is emblematic of the problems of the US political system. Another possible solution is to increase awareness of cognitive biases in decision making and perhaps improving our educational system by elevating the importance of critical analysis. However, I steer towards the latter of your proposed solutions. That such a large % of the voting public gets its news from facebook is depressing.

sien 9y ago

When George W Bush won the election it was all the fault of Fox News and right wing radio. Now that HRC lost the fault now lies allegedly with social media and evil foreigners. It's like people blaming comic books, TV, rock music and video games for what they see as the failings of youth. Acknowledging that the Democrats chose poor candidates in Gore and Clinton and that winning three Presidential terms in a row is hard is apparently harder than blaming people for voting the 'wrong' way on some new media development.

akira2501 9y ago
> When George W Bush won the election it was all the fault of Fox News and right wing radio. I was pretty sure we're laying that one at the feet of the Florida State Supreme Court.

devinhelton 9y ago

In the last few months of the presidential campaign, a BuzzFeed analysis concluded, fake news stories got more Facebook engagement than the most widely read stories from major news outlets. Isn't there a problem with this Buzzfeed analysis in that it assumes that the engagement for fake news is actually real? We know that a ton of the engagement for fake news is itself faked for ad fraud purposes -- http://sadbottrue.com/article/profitable-info-dump/ http://sadbottrue.com/article/profitable-info-dump/ -- so I'm not sure what we can learn from the raw numbers that Buzzfeed had access to.