6 ms·

i really wish they would get off this 'we lost the election because of misinformation on facebook so something has to be done about it' rhetoric. leaked emails

i really wish they would get off this 'we lost the election because of misinformation on facebook so something has to be done about it' rhetoric. leaked emails (by help of the russians) surely helped trump, but even democrats concede that information was TRUE. this has nothing to do with social media, but training in the DNC about phishing scams might help. but honestly, there were so many huge flaws in the hillary campaign (relying 100% on data that was already proven in the primaries to be next to useless, disgust over the shadyness in how the clintons took over the dnc and stacked the deck against sanders, etc). and lets face it, they didnt have a problem with the internet when obama was using it to win, such as 'obama universities' training people to use a pyramid network on social media to basically create broadcast storms to get the algorithms to push their content to the top and shout out dissenting opinions.

geggam 9y ago
Im not sure that many people voted for any of the individuals. Hillary represented the establishment. The last two presidents were a huge and dramatic shift away from status quo. I think people are voting for the least likely to be a part of the machine. I wonder what happens when the people realize any candidate who gets into the primary is part of the machine ?
- kazagistar 9y ago
  > I wonder what happens when the people realize any candidate who gets into the primary is part of the machine ? They stop voting like half the country already has.
  - autokad 9y ago
    a lot of them has simply given up, hence the opiod crisis
- Clubber 9y ago
  Yes, it was also nothing new. Put a Russian ad side by side with a right or left wing PAC ad and I'd wager you'd have a hard time telling the difference. There were samples released on the internet. There were both liberal and conservative ads taken out too, so it wasn't just pro-Trump like most people believe. It seems as if the campaign was more to divide the country than pick any particular candidate. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/russian-ads-facebook-targeting/?utm_term=.eb06a43cfe48 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/russia...
- specialist 9y ago
  This is a depressing, liberating read: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government http://a.co/3Z1dt6b http://a.co/3Z1dt6b TL;DR: People vote based on identity and morph their views to match their chosen candidate. Struggling to accept this, I've now more or less given up on persuasion, messaging, framing, platforms, etc.
mantas 9y ago
> i really wish they would get off this 'we lost the election because of misinformation on facebook so something has to be done about it' rhetoric. I wonder of DNC will stick hard to this and nominate Clinton in next election as well. Usually loosing political parties change their stance a wee bit to pander to wider demographics next time. Because politicians are, well, representatives. So far it looks like DNC thinks they're correct and people are wrong.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Usually loosing political parties change their stance a wee bit to pander to wider demographics next time. Because politicians are, well, representatives. So far it looks like DNC thinks they're correct and people are wrong. While hardcore members of the progressive faction (myself included) don't think it's as much as they should have, the DNC has made major moves to accommodate that faction, in the areas of policy stances, DNC personnel, and internal DNC administration and nomination process. It's been the single most significant change in a major party after an election defeat since, probably, the 1970s.
  - mantas 9y ago
    Good to hear. I guess it hasn't bubbled up in media enough. Fingers crossed next time the candidate will be better. I hope continuing pursuit of "email hacking" and other election-time stories is more of a media thing than DNC itself. And that DNC will manage to change media coverage from that to their next offering to the nation.
Mc_Big_G 9y ago
Wow, you're really dismissing the power of propaganda? You really don't think people seeing anti-hillary memes and posts on Facebook from Russian trolls all day didn't have a huge effect? You're seriously underestimating the power of "advertising".
- ihsw2 9y ago
  Hillary lost the election. She was handed the presidency on the silver platter and she was so unappealing on so many levels that the Democrats' popularity cratered with key constituents. The arrogance of progressive supremacists knows no bounds.
- rdtsc 9y ago
  > You really don't think people seeing anti-hillary memes and posts on Facebook from Russian trolls all day didn't have a huge effect? What effect do you think it had? Do you think Hillary with $1.5B budget lost the election because of $100k Facebook ads?
  - specialist 9y ago
    Ya, I'm skeptical too. Let's say those foreign ads flipped 40k votes. That's statistical noise. But companies like Cambridge Analytics are only too happy to claim credit for having near supernatural powers. And obsessing over the margins keeps attention away from the huge, persistent, systemic, neglected problems. Amusing ourselves to death. More troubling are the rubes who fell for the protests / counterprotests organized by agitators.
- mark_l_watson 9y ago
  I am a Democrat: I think a small budget of FB ads was nothing compared to MSNBC killing the Sanders campaign. That was much more outrageous.
  - rdtsc 9y ago
    > I think a small budget of FB ads was nothing compared to MSNBC killing the Sanders campaign. That was much more outrageous. Yeah I remember the media silence. Also, I think the remarkable thing was not that Hillary won in the primaries but how many votes Sanders got despite the silence. Here was an unnamed old white man that few have heard of before elections gathering so many enthusiastic young followers. The DNC and Clinton could have done more to bring back or incorporate some of Sanders' policies into Clinton's campaign or in general to be more welcoming towards Sanders' voters.
specialist 9y ago
No. Reasons Trump "won", in order: 1) 2m voters were disenfranchised. 200k in Milwaukee alone. 2) Racism 3) Electoral college 4) $3b free earned media for Trump campaign. The clutching of pearls over fake news, facebook, Russia is because the above factors make these contests close enough for the GOP to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat. The stickiest wicket in all this: Just like in 2000, the Democrats cannot just say the system is broken, for the risk of further demotivating voters. So they just suck it up. Meanwhile, corporate media concern trolls with "unlikeability", "Benghazi", "hacked emails". Pretty much any outrage, distraction to keep people from acknowledging the emperor has no clothes. PS- HRC won the popular vote.
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  ... disenfranchised. 200k in Milwaukee alone. This claim is based on taking the difference in turnout between 2012 and 2016, and then attributing it entirely to a voter id law change. Note, even though she lost Wisconsin during the primary to Sanders, she assumed she would win it anyway during the election. So much so that she NEVER visited the state even once during the election... the first time a major party candidate has skipped WI since 1972. In comparison, he's a map of the 2012 events.. blue and purple are places obama visited, turquoise is biden.. a dot means multiple events: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1djIi5ol21yzrnXDr2A34CykfGvc&msa=0&ll=36.92039099272268%2C-95.29094700000002&z=5 https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1djIi5ol21yzrnXDr2A...
  - specialist 9y ago
    The GOP credits their disenfranchisement efforts for their outsized victories. You saying they're wrong? -- So you're saying it's okay for Trump to fail upwards, but HRC didn't make every perfect move, so she deserved to lose?
    - rgbrenner 9y ago
      do you realize that trump and pence visited WI 10 times (trump 6, pence 5)? And for all of that effort, he won by 20k votes. Obama had to work hard to win WI by a slim margin; trump had to work hard to win WI by a slim margin. In 2004, Kerry visited the state 11 times; Bush 12 times. Wisconsin was indisputably a battleground state... and all of these people had to work hard to win it. But not Hillary. I'm not commenting on anything else about this election.. just WI. The idea that Hillary could win WI while putting in zero effort is ridiculous.

geggam 9y ago

Im not sure that many people voted for any of the individuals. Hillary represented the establishment. The last two presidents were a huge and dramatic shift away from status quo. I think people are voting for the least likely to be a part of the machine. I wonder what happens when the people realize any candidate who gets into the primary is part of the machine ?

kazagistar 9y ago
> I wonder what happens when the people realize any candidate who gets into the primary is part of the machine ? They stop voting like half the country already has.
- autokad 9y ago
  a lot of them has simply given up, hence the opiod crisis
Clubber 9y ago
Yes, it was also nothing new. Put a Russian ad side by side with a right or left wing PAC ad and I'd wager you'd have a hard time telling the difference. There were samples released on the internet. There were both liberal and conservative ads taken out too, so it wasn't just pro-Trump like most people believe. It seems as if the campaign was more to divide the country than pick any particular candidate. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/russian-ads-facebook-targeting/?utm_term=.eb06a43cfe48 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/russia...
specialist 9y ago
This is a depressing, liberating read: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government http://a.co/3Z1dt6b http://a.co/3Z1dt6b TL;DR: People vote based on identity and morph their views to match their chosen candidate. Struggling to accept this, I've now more or less given up on persuasion, messaging, framing, platforms, etc.

mantas 9y ago

> i really wish they would get off this 'we lost the election because of misinformation on facebook so something has to be done about it' rhetoric. I wonder of DNC will stick hard to this and nominate Clinton in next election as well. Usually loosing political parties change their stance a wee bit to pander to wider demographics next time. Because politicians are, well, representatives. So far it looks like DNC thinks they're correct and people are wrong.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Usually loosing political parties change their stance a wee bit to pander to wider demographics next time. Because politicians are, well, representatives. So far it looks like DNC thinks they're correct and people are wrong. While hardcore members of the progressive faction (myself included) don't think it's as much as they should have, the DNC has made major moves to accommodate that faction, in the areas of policy stances, DNC personnel, and internal DNC administration and nomination process. It's been the single most significant change in a major party after an election defeat since, probably, the 1970s.
- mantas 9y ago
  Good to hear. I guess it hasn't bubbled up in media enough. Fingers crossed next time the candidate will be better. I hope continuing pursuit of "email hacking" and other election-time stories is more of a media thing than DNC itself. And that DNC will manage to change media coverage from that to their next offering to the nation.

Mc_Big_G 9y ago

Wow, you're really dismissing the power of propaganda? You really don't think people seeing anti-hillary memes and posts on Facebook from Russian trolls all day didn't have a huge effect? You're seriously underestimating the power of "advertising".

ihsw2 9y ago
Hillary lost the election. She was handed the presidency on the silver platter and she was so unappealing on so many levels that the Democrats' popularity cratered with key constituents. The arrogance of progressive supremacists knows no bounds.
rdtsc 9y ago
> You really don't think people seeing anti-hillary memes and posts on Facebook from Russian trolls all day didn't have a huge effect? What effect do you think it had? Do you think Hillary with $1.5B budget lost the election because of $100k Facebook ads?
- specialist 9y ago
  Ya, I'm skeptical too. Let's say those foreign ads flipped 40k votes. That's statistical noise. But companies like Cambridge Analytics are only too happy to claim credit for having near supernatural powers. And obsessing over the margins keeps attention away from the huge, persistent, systemic, neglected problems. Amusing ourselves to death. More troubling are the rubes who fell for the protests / counterprotests organized by agitators.
mark_l_watson 9y ago
I am a Democrat: I think a small budget of FB ads was nothing compared to MSNBC killing the Sanders campaign. That was much more outrageous.
- rdtsc 9y ago
  > I think a small budget of FB ads was nothing compared to MSNBC killing the Sanders campaign. That was much more outrageous. Yeah I remember the media silence. Also, I think the remarkable thing was not that Hillary won in the primaries but how many votes Sanders got despite the silence. Here was an unnamed old white man that few have heard of before elections gathering so many enthusiastic young followers. The DNC and Clinton could have done more to bring back or incorporate some of Sanders' policies into Clinton's campaign or in general to be more welcoming towards Sanders' voters.

specialist 9y ago

No. Reasons Trump "won", in order: 1) 2m voters were disenfranchised. 200k in Milwaukee alone. 2) Racism 3) Electoral college 4) $3b free earned media for Trump campaign. The clutching of pearls over fake news, facebook, Russia is because the above factors make these contests close enough for the GOP to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat. The stickiest wicket in all this: Just like in 2000, the Democrats cannot just say the system is broken, for the risk of further demotivating voters. So they just suck it up. Meanwhile, corporate media concern trolls with "unlikeability", "Benghazi", "hacked emails". Pretty much any outrage, distraction to keep people from acknowledging the emperor has no clothes. PS- HRC won the popular vote.

rgbrenner 9y ago
... disenfranchised. 200k in Milwaukee alone. This claim is based on taking the difference in turnout between 2012 and 2016, and then attributing it entirely to a voter id law change. Note, even though she lost Wisconsin during the primary to Sanders, she assumed she would win it anyway during the election. So much so that she NEVER visited the state even once during the election... the first time a major party candidate has skipped WI since 1972. In comparison, he's a map of the 2012 events.. blue and purple are places obama visited, turquoise is biden.. a dot means multiple events: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1djIi5ol21yzrnXDr2A34CykfGvc&msa=0&ll=36.92039099272268%2C-95.29094700000002&z=5 https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1djIi5ol21yzrnXDr2A...
- specialist 9y ago
  The GOP credits their disenfranchisement efforts for their outsized victories. You saying they're wrong? -- So you're saying it's okay for Trump to fail upwards, but HRC didn't make every perfect move, so she deserved to lose?
  - rgbrenner 9y ago
    do you realize that trump and pence visited WI 10 times (trump 6, pence 5)? And for all of that effort, he won by 20k votes. Obama had to work hard to win WI by a slim margin; trump had to work hard to win WI by a slim margin. In 2004, Kerry visited the state 11 times; Bush 12 times. Wisconsin was indisputably a battleground state... and all of these people had to work hard to win it. But not Hillary. I'm not commenting on anything else about this election.. just WI. The idea that Hillary could win WI while putting in zero effort is ridiculous.