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posted by
janrinok
on Wednesday November 16 2016, @12:17AM
from the truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth dept.
from the truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth dept.
Despite the best efforts of Mark Zuckerberg to downplay Facebook's role in the election of Donald Trump, the scrutiny of how fake news is spread on the platform has intensified.
Buzzfeed News is reporting that "more than dozens" of Facebook employees have created an unofficial task force dedicated to addressing the issue.
Buzzfeed quoted one member of that task force, who did not want to be named over fears for their job.
"[Mark Zuckerberg] knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season," the source said.
The election shook out the way it did because there were ways around the narrative the media was pushing?
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Facebook's Fake News Crisis Deepens
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poverty, n.:
An unfortunate state that persists as long
as anyone lacks anything he would like to have.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 16 2016, @04:15PM
A large percentage of people who were eligible to vote didn't even bother.
This is true of every election, but it's fundamental to most outcomes too. A *lot* depends on voter turnout. You can convince all the people you want that your candidate is great and/or that the other candidate is evil, but unless those people actually come to the polls, it's worthless. In this election, people were surprised that Clinton lost many swing states (and some that were supposedly more "safe"), but a lot of that had to do with decreased turnout for the Dems compared to previous elections. Again, that's not meant to be the only cause or even the primary one -- but it's important to remember that elections are about how many people you can convince to SHOW UP, not just how many people agree with you. In an election where both major candidates were widely disliked even by those within their own parties, this is bound to be a significant factor.
So yeah, maybe a small group of informed voters had a particular stance on a particular issue and effectively swung the election accordingly.
I understand why we go through this, but I hate this sort of analysis a bit. It always seems to dismiss the contributions of the large majority of voters (who ARE significant, if only because not all of them are guaranteed to show up), while focusing on some small "critical" group of voters. Often this analysis seemed to be about assessing blame -- "If only candidate X had targeted Y voters more," etc. Worse yet are the narratives that like to try to blame 3rd-party voters and "spoilers."
Classic example: Florida in 2000. The margin of error was so large in the ways that votes were counted that just about anything could have swung that election. (Subsequent analyses of different vote-counting methods showed reasonable scenarios where either candidate -- Bush or Gore -- could have come up with more votes. Ironically, some of the standards Gore was arguing for would have elected Bush, and vice versa.) And even if you get beyond "hanging chads," you have the folks who wanted to blame Nader for everything as a "spoiler." I'm not a Nader fan (and don't live in Florida anyway), but this always struck me as an odd analysis. The number of registered Dems who voted for Bush was well over twice the number of all Nader voters combined (including all registered Dems, Reps, and independents). Gore could have swung the count in Florida by getting just a TINY percentage of those defecting Democrats, whereas he'd need a much larger percentage of the Nader Dems or independents. Or he could have just increased turnout very slightly among the Democratic base. And Nader was a presence in the 2000 race nationally and affected the way the major candidates behaved to some extent -- if you took him out and ran the election again, there's no guarantee that the Florida vote wouldn't have swung a different way entirely.
Bottom line is that elections are incredibly complex, and when it comes down to a few percentage points between candidates, there are generally all sorts of things that could have swung the count one way or the other. I think it often does more harm than good to focus on some tiny subset of "swing voters" and blame them or try to characterize them as the only reason for a win or loss. Often a slight uptick or loss in the turnout of the base for a party is enough to overwhelm such "swing voter" effects in a tight race, so whether Clinton or Gore or whoever "fires up" their base is critical... but it's a lot easier for parties to try to find other scapegoats among "independents" or 3rd-parties or whatever. It deflects attention from the fact that your party made a bad choice in nominating a less popular candidate.