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Good thing it wasn’t a debate I asked for or mentioned whatsoever in my comment. Clearly technology has affected politics in the last five years. That doesn’t

Good thing it wasn’t a debate I asked for or mentioned whatsoever in my comment. Clearly technology has affected politics in the last five years. That doesn’t mean it was the sole source of said political action. This seems so tritely obvious to me I don’t know why it needs to be debated.

neogodless 6y ago
Your insistence that the necessity of Black Lives Matter protests is an equivalent phenomenon to the demagoguery of Donald Trump suggests that you do not believe there is systemic racism, that police unequally target and murder black people, that perhaps the election was actually stolen. Using social media for disinformation campaigns is not equal to using social media to organize peaceful protests. The fact that 7% of those protests involved some kind of violence (which includes escalation by police, counter-protests, opportunistic looters and yes, perhaps some protestors who have plenty of reason for anger escalating to violence) does not take us to the conclusion that social media caused these protests. They were not based on a disinformation campaign. They were based on violent events that took place. The belief that the election was stolen is not based on violent events taking place. The claims of evidence have all been hand-waving, such as misunderstanding the Blue wave due to a much higher percentage of mail-in ballots going to Democrats, which was caused by disinformation about mail-in ballot fraud. Looks like we're debating which reality is based on facts, and it does need to be debated. If we had a shared reality, then perhaps there could be debate on what data points need included in an article exploring social media used in disinformation campaigns, but we do not share the same perspective on what is reality.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  Nowhere did I say they were equivalent. I said they were both manifestations of the same technological phenomenon.
loceng 6y ago
You're gatekeeping here, interesting tactics you've developed to avoid having to counter valid arguments people put forward - along with claiming one of my replies to you was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop - here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802608

neogodless 6y ago

Your insistence that the necessity of Black Lives Matter protests is an equivalent phenomenon to the demagoguery of Donald Trump suggests that you do not believe there is systemic racism, that police unequally target and murder black people, that perhaps the election was actually stolen. Using social media for disinformation campaigns is not equal to using social media to organize peaceful protests. The fact that 7% of those protests involved some kind of violence (which includes escalation by police, counter-protests, opportunistic looters and yes, perhaps some protestors who have plenty of reason for anger escalating to violence) does not take us to the conclusion that social media caused these protests. They were not based on a disinformation campaign. They were based on violent events that took place. The belief that the election was stolen is not based on violent events taking place. The claims of evidence have all been hand-waving, such as misunderstanding the Blue wave due to a much higher percentage of mail-in ballots going to Democrats, which was caused by disinformation about mail-in ballot fraud. Looks like we're debating which reality is based on facts, and it does need to be debated. If we had a shared reality, then perhaps there could be debate on what data points need included in an article exploring social media used in disinformation campaigns, but we do not share the same perspective on what is reality.

ceilingcorner 6y ago
Nowhere did I say they were equivalent. I said they were both manifestations of the same technological phenomenon.

loceng 6y ago

You're gatekeeping here, interesting tactics you've developed to avoid having to counter valid arguments people put forward - along with claiming one of my replies to you was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop - here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802608