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Jonathan Albright, a Digital Sleuth Exposing Fake News

43 points by ehudla 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
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deleted 8y ago
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giantsloth 8y ago
Did this guy pay for this article? It's a pure personal branding/ego piece about a guy who watched a lot of YouTube and had also happened to write for Washington Post (owned by Amazon) and The New York Times, known for publishing absolute reprehensible garbage op-ed pieces justifying atrocities perpetuated by neoliberals while ostensibly still being on the left.
- wyck 8y ago
  I agree, reads like a pure bio PR, the title says it all. Lots of trust building about his personally,the usual pantomime of nazi's and Russian bots, no bias there.. So we should't trust content pushed by people centric platforms, and only trusted news sources with well written introductions..
- gromy 8y ago
  “Albright, who looks at least a decade younger than his 40 years”
vowelless 8y ago
> He discovered a trove of exposed Cambridge Analytica tools in the online code repository Github, long before most people knew the shady, defunct data firm’s name. Anyone know what this is about?
- severine 8y ago
  https://www.upguard.com/breaches/aggregate-iq-part-one https://www.upguard.com/breaches/aggregate-iq-part-one
kryogen1c 8y ago
Calling YouTube fake news is a travesty. It's actually just not news at all. Before I gave up and unfriended them, I used to try and debate some FB friends that believed in chem trails, flat Earth, and other ridiculous things. I wasn't arguing against logic, reason, or science. I was arguing with YT channels Richie From Boston and others ( I wont link it; that rabbit hole is left to the reader). The last thing that was said to me before unfriending was "i see what you're doing. That's real low energy, man." I think arguing for the public's hearts and minds has more to do with the former than latter.
- rhcom2 8y ago
  I was once in a restaurant waiting for take out reading a newspaper and a guy came up to me to tell me all newspapers were fake and you couldn't trust them (before going on a rant about the Rothschilds). I asked him where he got his information about the world and he told me "videos on the internet." I don't even know how you begin to have a real conversation with that as a starting point.
  - sethrin 8y ago
    The thing to recognize is that they are not using the same truth-finding-function that you are. That may in fact mean that you can't meaningfully compare truths. You are being empirical; they are either relying on "it makes sense" (rationalism, probably) or they are relying on their trust in the person making the statement. I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is, but it's probably not empirical evidence, since that isn't what they consider to be valid. Mostly I think the solution is to teach children science and history, and that if they get to be adults without having those frameworks of understanding, there's no real hope of acquiring them. I'd like to believe that's just cynicism though.
- ng12 8y ago
  That's the problem isn't it -- fake news is generated for the people who want to believe it. Censoring it won't make them suddenly become rational.
belorn 8y ago
Ever since last winter I am a bit cautious when articles like this pop up. I was on a conference where one of the handful tracks was fact checking, and a keynote speaker used images like the one in the article to illustrate how news media has failed during the 2016 election. One image that specially caught my attention was a word cloud made from polls about what voters knew about each candidate, and the speaker made a big point that all the major scandals was missing from Trumps side but the Clinton side was full of it. This rang all kind of warning bells, so I went and looked up the source and suddenly it made all good sense. The polls was done between the start of the preliminaries (which happen to be around the time wikileaks started publishing their stuff) and ended a couple months before the election day, and all those "missing" scandals about Trump that made international news are all more or less during those last couple of months. In that context the word cloud perfectly matched more or less everything what international news had been writing about the two candidates during the preliminaries and shortly afterward before the election campaign had really started. The researchers even noted this in their original paper, pointing out that if the polls had been done closer to election date then the data would look very different. I could have used many of the same material to hold my own keynote about how news has successfully informed the public correctly. I notified the conference organizers, but I doubt it had any effect since the message followed the political tides right now. People want to believe that fake news caused the election results, and that is to me a very worrying. First we need to establish if it did, and it seems that everyone is skipping that step.
- tcbawo 8y ago
  Informing the public correctly, or accurately parroting one candidate's desired message about the other candidate(s)? It seems clear to me that the media are afraid of losing access and retaliation at the business level for granting unfavorable coverage. It's all become a circus.
  - kryogen1c 8y ago
    This only surprising if you think the media's positive feedback mechanism is accurate and reliable news. They're only requirement is to make money - information is secondary.
ptaipale 8y ago
It's quite strange to complain about YouTube and call its front page" fake news. That's pretty much like blaming "television" is fake news. Youtube is a carrier, rather like UHF frequency is a band for transmitting carriers. Your television can show anything, depending on which channels you choose to watch. YouTube service also contains just about anything, and there's no such thing as a "YouTube front page" like you have front page of a newspaper. It's your own front page that comes up, based on what you've previously been interested in. If you are interested in fake news, you'll see fake news in YouTube. Just like if you're interested in supermarket tabloid stories, you'll buy National Enquirer and read that. It's your choice.
- aalleavitch 8y ago
  It's not though, you do not write the algorithm, YouTube does.
- untog 8y ago
  UHF does not have an algorithm behind it recommending you content. No one goes to YouTube because they are interested in fake news, they go with the intention of being informed but watch a video with false content in it. Then YouTube's algorithms show them more and more fake content in an attempt to keep them watching.
  - kryogen1c 8y ago
    > Then YouTube's algorithms show them more and more fake content in an attempt to keep them watching. Have a source for that claim? I watch a lot of YouTube with one account and it only recommends things similiar to what I already watch. There's no sudden fake news switch to Fox news or CNN or... anything, really.
    - untog 8y ago
      This is a pretty interesting account of the recommendation algorithms at work: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po... It links to this WSJ investigation: How YouTube Drives People to the Internet’s Darkest Corners https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-youtube-drives-viewers-to-the-internets-darkest-corners-1518020478 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-youtube-drives-viewers-to-t... I suspect people who watch a lot of YouTube aren't as badly affected as there is a large dataset to recommend from.
mirimir 8y ago
> It’s Albright’s research that helped build a bruising story in The New York Times on how the Russians used fake identities to stoke American rage. OK, so Albright has done outstanding work. His map[0] is mind-blowing. But there's another key aspect: This isn't new. For sure, Russian propagandists are using the Internet very effectively. However, Russian influence on US culture and politics goes back many decades. Communist groups in the US during the 30s-60s. US anti-war movements in the 60s-80s. The anti-draft movement, with heavy Quaker involvement. And the Soviet-American Friendship Society. That Ramparts article about Johnson and JFK's corpse. And since the 90s, they've been focusing more on the radical right. Pushing distrust of the US government. I saw that developing in cypherpunk communities. But I wasn't sure, until RT appeared. And by the way, I'm not arguing that Russia isn't justified in doing all this. It's arguably just defense. Because the US does it too. In Afghanistan, supporting the Taliban. In the Balkans. In the Ukraine. In Chile. I mean, they broke up the Soviet Union, and one aspect was propaganda. Anyway, just sayin'. Edit: I'm not arguing that those were all Russian front groups. Just that they were Russian influenced. And here's another example: Mad Magazine :) Also, the US did the same. I mean, the US promoted modern/abstract art as a Cold War weapon! Edit: I'm not making this up.[1] Also, re support offered to the JFK campaign.[2] 0) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook#img-4 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-de... 1) https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/russia-facebook-race/542796/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/ru... 2) http://time.com/4851449/trump-jr-russian-kennedy-history/ http://time.com/4851449/trump-jr-russian-kennedy-history/
dominotw 8y ago
Speaking of news. Anyone know why CNN "leaking" debate questions to presidential questions was quickly forgotten. Atleast with Russia we somewhat know who the enemy but who is behind insidious actors who are leaking questions and why are they doing it. Was it really just one bad actor?
- krapp 8y ago
  The Trump campaign and his right wing supporters tried to present it as a scandal which should not only disqualify Hillary Clinton from running, but which proved a criminal, possibly treasonous, conspiracy by the DNC and Clinton to undermine the American political process and "rig the election." It was quickly forgotten about because the right wing overplayed the anti-leftist outrage card, as they tend to do, and only people already invested in their conspiratorial rhetoric could muster the effort to care.
  - dominotw 8y ago
    why don't regular people care about though. Isn't it a big deal? Why aren't such acts considered 'fake news'.
    - krapp 8y ago
      No, it wasn't a big deal, certainly not as big a deal as Trump supporters want to imply - a scandal on par with Watergate. The fallout and consequences were in correct proportion to their relevance. Donna Brazile resigned, CNN cut ties with her, the news cycle eventually moved on.
      - dominotw 8y ago
        Can your tell me why it isn't a big deal without framing it wrt to "trump supporters".Surely its possible to look at this without partisan lens. As a regular citizen I think its a big deal because 1. It eroded publics confidence in MSM giving rise to alternative/fake news sites. 2. What about Donna Brazile's collaborators. Surely she didn't pull this off all by herself. 3. What were the motivations of collaborators at CNN, why did they do it.
Jerry2 8y ago
I posted this before but after reading about all this "fake news" phenomena, I came across this TEDx talk by Sharyl Attkisson: "How Real Is Fake News?" [1]. She's a former reporter for CBS News and in the video, she explains where the term comes from, who's behind it and what the long-term consequences are. If you have 10 min of free time, give it a watch. She also gave another amazing talk on corporate astroturfing and media manipulation [2]: "Astroturf and manipulation of media messages" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQcCIzjz9_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQcCIzjz9_s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU
- crdoconnor 8y ago
  >where the term comes from Apparently it wasn't really used before November 9th, 2016 and then suddenly it became a talking point on certain US news networks: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%22fake%20news%22 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
  - avivo 8y ago
    The term was popularized from reporting by Craig Silverman which he had been going on for years as described here https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/i-helped-popularize-the-term-fake-news-and-now-i-cringe https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/i-helped... . It started to become widely used after this article https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa... , showed the top 5 "fake" stories had more Facebook engagement than the top 5 "mainstream" stories. The term and coverage was grounded in a real phenomenon, though many people in the field (myself included) prefer to use other terms.
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      The term itself dates to the late 1980s, and formerly referred to corporate-produced propaganda in the form of audio- and video- news releases (AVRs and VNRs). A search of the Nexis media database indicates that the term was initially used more broadly. In May 1989 Adweek writer Barbara Lippert panned ads in which former newsreader Linda Ellerbee appeared "in a fake news setting" hustling Maxwell House coffee. In August that year Ad Day's Ed Buxton criticized the use of "the fake news bite" where reporters re-enacted news events as part of a news story. However, it was a cover article by David Lieberman titled "Fake News" in the February 1992 edition of TV Guide that popularized the term. In his article Lieberman took the media and PR industry to task over video news releases. He argued that if footage from VNR's were used in news it should be labelled so that viewers were aware of its origin. If not, he argued, media outlets risked undermining their own credibility if they "pretend out of pride that what they broadcast is real news, instead of labeling it for what it is." https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fake_news https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fake_news
CM30 8y ago
Sigh, I admire the data analysis stuff this guy does and it's nice he tries to track how many people follow Russian made accounts or what not, but I feel the article/mindset here is still the same as in every political article recently: People only voted for Trump because they were 'tricked'. It's like media folk and political pundits cannot fathom the idea that the political system is simply broken for many people. Yes it's likely trolls and state sponsored propaganda helped, since a situation where people are so heavily divided is easy to stir up controversy in. But at the end of the day, what was on offer in the recent election? Four years of 'more of the same' or someone who claimed to overthrow the system. A choice between an insane person and a bunch of career politicians with no charisma. Just feels like it's a constant set of searches for a nefarious conspiracy rather than accepting that the current system isn't offering much to anyone outside of large corporations and that people were getting sick of it.
- gromy 8y ago
  >> People only voted for Trump because they were 'tricked'. This narrative implies we lack free will and is really insulting to people. They’re using fear to position the reader as a potential victim who should continue reading their articles to avoid a similar fate.

43 points by ehudla 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deleted 8y ago

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giantsloth 8y ago

Did this guy pay for this article? It's a pure personal branding/ego piece about a guy who watched a lot of YouTube and had also happened to write for Washington Post (owned by Amazon) and The New York Times, known for publishing absolute reprehensible garbage op-ed pieces justifying atrocities perpetuated by neoliberals while ostensibly still being on the left.

wyck 8y ago
I agree, reads like a pure bio PR, the title says it all. Lots of trust building about his personally,the usual pantomime of nazi's and Russian bots, no bias there.. So we should't trust content pushed by people centric platforms, and only trusted news sources with well written introductions..
gromy 8y ago
“Albright, who looks at least a decade younger than his 40 years”

vowelless 8y ago

> He discovered a trove of exposed Cambridge Analytica tools in the online code repository Github, long before most people knew the shady, defunct data firm’s name. Anyone know what this is about?

severine 8y ago
https://www.upguard.com/breaches/aggregate-iq-part-one https://www.upguard.com/breaches/aggregate-iq-part-one

kryogen1c 8y ago

Calling YouTube fake news is a travesty. It's actually just not news at all. Before I gave up and unfriended them, I used to try and debate some FB friends that believed in chem trails, flat Earth, and other ridiculous things. I wasn't arguing against logic, reason, or science. I was arguing with YT channels Richie From Boston and others ( I wont link it; that rabbit hole is left to the reader). The last thing that was said to me before unfriending was "i see what you're doing. That's real low energy, man." I think arguing for the public's hearts and minds has more to do with the former than latter.

rhcom2 8y ago
I was once in a restaurant waiting for take out reading a newspaper and a guy came up to me to tell me all newspapers were fake and you couldn't trust them (before going on a rant about the Rothschilds). I asked him where he got his information about the world and he told me "videos on the internet." I don't even know how you begin to have a real conversation with that as a starting point.
- sethrin 8y ago
  The thing to recognize is that they are not using the same truth-finding-function that you are. That may in fact mean that you can't meaningfully compare truths. You are being empirical; they are either relying on "it makes sense" (rationalism, probably) or they are relying on their trust in the person making the statement. I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is, but it's probably not empirical evidence, since that isn't what they consider to be valid. Mostly I think the solution is to teach children science and history, and that if they get to be adults without having those frameworks of understanding, there's no real hope of acquiring them. I'd like to believe that's just cynicism though.
ng12 8y ago
That's the problem isn't it -- fake news is generated for the people who want to believe it. Censoring it won't make them suddenly become rational.

belorn 8y ago

Ever since last winter I am a bit cautious when articles like this pop up. I was on a conference where one of the handful tracks was fact checking, and a keynote speaker used images like the one in the article to illustrate how news media has failed during the 2016 election. One image that specially caught my attention was a word cloud made from polls about what voters knew about each candidate, and the speaker made a big point that all the major scandals was missing from Trumps side but the Clinton side was full of it. This rang all kind of warning bells, so I went and looked up the source and suddenly it made all good sense. The polls was done between the start of the preliminaries (which happen to be around the time wikileaks started publishing their stuff) and ended a couple months before the election day, and all those "missing" scandals about Trump that made international news are all more or less during those last couple of months. In that context the word cloud perfectly matched more or less everything what international news had been writing about the two candidates during the preliminaries and shortly afterward before the election campaign had really started. The researchers even noted this in their original paper, pointing out that if the polls had been done closer to election date then the data would look very different. I could have used many of the same material to hold my own keynote about how news has successfully informed the public correctly. I notified the conference organizers, but I doubt it had any effect since the message followed the political tides right now. People want to believe that fake news caused the election results, and that is to me a very worrying. First we need to establish if it did, and it seems that everyone is skipping that step.

tcbawo 8y ago
Informing the public correctly, or accurately parroting one candidate's desired message about the other candidate(s)? It seems clear to me that the media are afraid of losing access and retaliation at the business level for granting unfavorable coverage. It's all become a circus.
- kryogen1c 8y ago
  This only surprising if you think the media's positive feedback mechanism is accurate and reliable news. They're only requirement is to make money - information is secondary.

ptaipale 8y ago

It's quite strange to complain about YouTube and call its front page" fake news. That's pretty much like blaming "television" is fake news. Youtube is a carrier, rather like UHF frequency is a band for transmitting carriers. Your television can show anything, depending on which channels you choose to watch. YouTube service also contains just about anything, and there's no such thing as a "YouTube front page" like you have front page of a newspaper. It's your own front page that comes up, based on what you've previously been interested in. If you are interested in fake news, you'll see fake news in YouTube. Just like if you're interested in supermarket tabloid stories, you'll buy National Enquirer and read that. It's your choice.

aalleavitch 8y ago
It's not though, you do not write the algorithm, YouTube does.
untog 8y ago
UHF does not have an algorithm behind it recommending you content. No one goes to YouTube because they are interested in fake news, they go with the intention of being informed but watch a video with false content in it. Then YouTube's algorithms show them more and more fake content in an attempt to keep them watching.
- kryogen1c 8y ago
  > Then YouTube's algorithms show them more and more fake content in an attempt to keep them watching. Have a source for that claim? I watch a lot of YouTube with one account and it only recommends things similiar to what I already watch. There's no sudden fake news switch to Fox news or CNN or... anything, really.
  - untog 8y ago
    This is a pretty interesting account of the recommendation algorithms at work: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po... It links to this WSJ investigation: How YouTube Drives People to the Internet’s Darkest Corners https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-youtube-drives-viewers-to-the-internets-darkest-corners-1518020478 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-youtube-drives-viewers-to-t... I suspect people who watch a lot of YouTube aren't as badly affected as there is a large dataset to recommend from.

mirimir 8y ago

> It’s Albright’s research that helped build a bruising story in The New York Times on how the Russians used fake identities to stoke American rage. OK, so Albright has done outstanding work. His map[0] is mind-blowing. But there's another key aspect: This isn't new. For sure, Russian propagandists are using the Internet very effectively. However, Russian influence on US culture and politics goes back many decades. Communist groups in the US during the 30s-60s. US anti-war movements in the 60s-80s. The anti-draft movement, with heavy Quaker involvement. And the Soviet-American Friendship Society. That Ramparts article about Johnson and JFK's corpse. And since the 90s, they've been focusing more on the radical right. Pushing distrust of the US government. I saw that developing in cypherpunk communities. But I wasn't sure, until RT appeared. And by the way, I'm not arguing that Russia isn't justified in doing all this. It's arguably just defense. Because the US does it too. In Afghanistan, supporting the Taliban. In the Balkans. In the Ukraine. In Chile. I mean, they broke up the Soviet Union, and one aspect was propaganda. Anyway, just sayin'. Edit: I'm not arguing that those were all Russian front groups. Just that they were Russian influenced. And here's another example: Mad Magazine :) Also, the US did the same. I mean, the US promoted modern/abstract art as a Cold War weapon! Edit: I'm not making this up.[1] Also, re support offered to the JFK campaign.[2] 0) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook#img-4 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-de... 1) https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/russia-facebook-race/542796/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/ru... 2) http://time.com/4851449/trump-jr-russian-kennedy-history/ http://time.com/4851449/trump-jr-russian-kennedy-history/

dominotw 8y ago

Speaking of news. Anyone know why CNN "leaking" debate questions to presidential questions was quickly forgotten. Atleast with Russia we somewhat know who the enemy but who is behind insidious actors who are leaking questions and why are they doing it. Was it really just one bad actor?

krapp 8y ago
The Trump campaign and his right wing supporters tried to present it as a scandal which should not only disqualify Hillary Clinton from running, but which proved a criminal, possibly treasonous, conspiracy by the DNC and Clinton to undermine the American political process and "rig the election." It was quickly forgotten about because the right wing overplayed the anti-leftist outrage card, as they tend to do, and only people already invested in their conspiratorial rhetoric could muster the effort to care.
- dominotw 8y ago
  why don't regular people care about though. Isn't it a big deal? Why aren't such acts considered 'fake news'.
  - krapp 8y ago
    No, it wasn't a big deal, certainly not as big a deal as Trump supporters want to imply - a scandal on par with Watergate. The fallout and consequences were in correct proportion to their relevance. Donna Brazile resigned, CNN cut ties with her, the news cycle eventually moved on.
    - dominotw 8y ago
      Can your tell me why it isn't a big deal without framing it wrt to "trump supporters".Surely its possible to look at this without partisan lens. As a regular citizen I think its a big deal because 1. It eroded publics confidence in MSM giving rise to alternative/fake news sites. 2. What about Donna Brazile's collaborators. Surely she didn't pull this off all by herself. 3. What were the motivations of collaborators at CNN, why did they do it.

Jerry2 8y ago

I posted this before but after reading about all this "fake news" phenomena, I came across this TEDx talk by Sharyl Attkisson: "How Real Is Fake News?" [1]. She's a former reporter for CBS News and in the video, she explains where the term comes from, who's behind it and what the long-term consequences are. If you have 10 min of free time, give it a watch. She also gave another amazing talk on corporate astroturfing and media manipulation [2]: "Astroturf and manipulation of media messages" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQcCIzjz9_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQcCIzjz9_s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU

crdoconnor 8y ago
>where the term comes from Apparently it wasn't really used before November 9th, 2016 and then suddenly it became a talking point on certain US news networks: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%22fake%20news%22 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
- avivo 8y ago
  The term was popularized from reporting by Craig Silverman which he had been going on for years as described here https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/i-helped-popularize-the-term-fake-news-and-now-i-cringe https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/i-helped... . It started to become widely used after this article https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa... , showed the top 5 "fake" stories had more Facebook engagement than the top 5 "mainstream" stories. The term and coverage was grounded in a real phenomenon, though many people in the field (myself included) prefer to use other terms.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    The term itself dates to the late 1980s, and formerly referred to corporate-produced propaganda in the form of audio- and video- news releases (AVRs and VNRs). A search of the Nexis media database indicates that the term was initially used more broadly. In May 1989 Adweek writer Barbara Lippert panned ads in which former newsreader Linda Ellerbee appeared "in a fake news setting" hustling Maxwell House coffee. In August that year Ad Day's Ed Buxton criticized the use of "the fake news bite" where reporters re-enacted news events as part of a news story. However, it was a cover article by David Lieberman titled "Fake News" in the February 1992 edition of TV Guide that popularized the term. In his article Lieberman took the media and PR industry to task over video news releases. He argued that if footage from VNR's were used in news it should be labelled so that viewers were aware of its origin. If not, he argued, media outlets risked undermining their own credibility if they "pretend out of pride that what they broadcast is real news, instead of labeling it for what it is." https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fake_news https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fake_news

CM30 8y ago

Sigh, I admire the data analysis stuff this guy does and it's nice he tries to track how many people follow Russian made accounts or what not, but I feel the article/mindset here is still the same as in every political article recently: People only voted for Trump because they were 'tricked'. It's like media folk and political pundits cannot fathom the idea that the political system is simply broken for many people. Yes it's likely trolls and state sponsored propaganda helped, since a situation where people are so heavily divided is easy to stir up controversy in. But at the end of the day, what was on offer in the recent election? Four years of 'more of the same' or someone who claimed to overthrow the system. A choice between an insane person and a bunch of career politicians with no charisma. Just feels like it's a constant set of searches for a nefarious conspiracy rather than accepting that the current system isn't offering much to anyone outside of large corporations and that people were getting sick of it.

gromy 8y ago
>> People only voted for Trump because they were 'tricked'. This narrative implies we lack free will and is really insulting to people. They’re using fear to position the reader as a potential victim who should continue reading their articles to avoid a similar fate.