
The Facebook bubble just popped - shawndumas
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/09/rigged/
======
misterbowfinger
We're all definitely in an echo chamber. Hacker News is an echo chamber. So is
Reddit, FB, Twitter, etc.

This is what happens when, as an industry, we move towards "personalization".
All of our "personalized" feeds allow businesses to increase their ad revenue,
but it siphons us away from the rest of the world. 30 years ago, we were
beholden to the large media outlets, which is _also_ bad, but I believe we've
overcorrected. All of our apps are just too personalized and they don't work
hard enough to tell us what we _should_ know, as opposed to what we want to
know.

~~~
meritt
HN is an echo chamber when it comes to tech choices, but it's absolutely not
when it comes to politics. I've seen many pro-Trump supporters in the ranks
here, which is very surprising given the demographic.

~~~
k__
Really?

When I read HN, I got the feeling, most political comments that get upvoted
are phrased like "I know everyone here is a liberal leftist, BUT I have to
tell you about my conservative right opinion right now, even if you don't
wanna hear it!"

But I never really encountered these "liberal leftist" majority here. Just in
places of the Internet that don't have anything good to say about HN.

~~~
advantark2
I think the difference with this site is that enough of us recognize that the
world isn't black or white, but grey. It seems like most sites don't have the
majority of people that think like that.

~~~
k__
I'm not sure that this is the case. But I am sure that the majority of people
here like to think of themselves as such.

------
JustSomeNobody
> On Facebook, a Trump victory was likely, or a Clinton win was all but
> assured.

And if you were watching the election coverage the night of you could very
discernibly see the change in the commentators narrative from "yay! Clinton!"
to the shock of "Wait, Trump?" to "Those dirty rednecks! (er ... uneducated
white folk)" as their reality was changing before them.

It wasn't JUST Facebook.

~~~
Waterluvian
I watched CNN and it was so painful to watch them try to keep it exciting.
They didn't want to call Florida for so long even after it became statically
impossible for Clinton to make up the difference.

The sense I got is the sooner the conclusion is reached, the sooner people
stop watching.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
I think since 2000 the networks are super cautious about calling Florida in
particular.

------
kens
The article links to the WSJ "Blue feed, red feed" page, which is very
interesting. It shows two different Facebook feeds side-by-side for various
topics and makes it clear just how much bias (in either direction) is in the
feed. In general I think the Internet has reduced the "filter bubble", but
these Facebook feeds, wow, that's a lot more filtering than I would have
expected.

[http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/](http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-
feed-red-feed/)

------
DubiousPusher
Stop writing narratives out of this.

Many of us who are incredulous about this election not because a Republican
won but because Donald Trump won.

We're shocked that you can mock a war hero, a person with a disability, a
sexual assault victim in the public sphere and still get elected.

It's not our politics that are shocked it's our sensibilities.

Edit: sorry about the original swear.

~~~
iamcasen
Exactly! Up until this week, presidents had to be... well, presidential. I'm
truly astonished that a demographic who is normally very outraged at moral
missteps voted this man into office.

------
gumby
What a screed. Example:

> To make matters worse, social media is a poor platform for getting people to
> understand opposing views. Another Pew study found that only 20 percent of
> users modified their stance on a social or political issue because of what
> they saw on social media. ...

OK, but did people "modify their stance on a social or political issue" due to
newspapers? TV? Or did they just pay attention to things that reinforced their
existing biases?

There may be a good criticism of FB, but this isn't it. And a scientific study
(not sure what that would look like, but whatever) might well show the
opposite.

------
helpfulanon
A popular uprising against Silicon Valley is coming. Already I hear it from
people in my life, all over the country.

They blame social media for allowing the Trump memes to warp people's opinion.
They're starting to put the pieces together on unemployment and blame tech
automation for taking jobs and not offering a replacement, especially in the
heartland. They're angry with Silicon Valley execs for not putting up any
visible fight against Trump. They're starting to see how clustering all the
best paying jobs in major cities leaves people outside of the bubble
desperate, seeing desperate solutions. A tidal wave of rage against the
election is about to be directed towards the tech industry, it's just a matter
of time.

~~~
snrplfth
I agree this is likely. You know, it's a funny sort of thing - people work in
the left-coast SV bubble-world making friendly-looking social media
applications and suddenly they find they're being looked at by the Old Media
crowd like they're a bunch of weapons dealers. I saw a surprisingly self-aware
look at this the other day: [https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2016/nov/04/political-me...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2016/nov/04/political-memes-2016-election-hillary-clinton-donald-trump)

In short, former cool-kid Adbusters "meme warrior", accustomed to culture-
jamming the elitist logics of "late capitalism", finds himself alarmingly
surrounded by the shadowy Meme Magicians of Esoteric Kekism. Meanwhile the
Hillary-friendly corporate media looks on, powerless to sink Trump with
criticism, but equally unable to stop themselves from giving him free
publicity. Suddenly, he finds the corporate mass media to be a "protective
membrane between the public and overly toxic ideas."

How the turntables, as they say.

I think what's really interesting is the difficulty of discerning how
effective this social media meme politics actually is, or to systematize its
internal structure. This isn't a TV ad campaign or a stump speech, it's a
distributed, continuous cacophony. So how can you tell whether it's what's
boosting the campaign, or whether it's just an epiphenomenon of an already-
successful campaign? This makes social media campaigning seem very threatening
- when you can't tell how it works, who knows how powerful it might really be?

~~~
helpfulanon
So true too. A long long time ago I was actually involved with Adbusters..
later on, in between stints of automating knowledge workers out of existence,
I worked to help engineer some of the viral marketing techniques that were
weaponized in this election. After Brexit, I went completely insane from
knowing what would happen this week. There was no way to stop it.

The problem is that virtually everyone dramatically underestimates the power
of viral manipulation. People believe that they have the power to make their
own choices, that they have their own thoughts. But the truth is, they really
don't. At all. Manipulating a tribe of humans to your cause is all just a
matter of effort and patience. My worldview is shaped by the information I
have. I just happen to spend a lot of time consuming complex information. Most
people don't have that luxury. So they're completely vulnerable. Social media
is powerful beyond the capabilities that I think anyone ever envisioned. And
it's begun to take on a new life of it's own.

~~~
snrplfth
I tend to think that the effectiveness of advertisement and memery really
depend on the context. When it comes to something where a choice has direct
effects and costs - when buying a plane ticket or an appliance, for example -
there is a strong incentive to discern true information and disregard
advertising fluff. This is because one's own choice is _the_ determining
factor, and a poor choice has clear consequences. But in politics? A single
vote is astronomically unlikely to influence anything - so voting is evaluated
socially, expressively. Its benefits and costs are what it does for one's
self-image, or group membership, or whatever. So there's not much incentive,
for nearly everybody, to sort the real from the imaginary when considering
politics. That's the kind of environment in which meme magic flourishes,
because believing _does_ make it real - real enough for its purposes. This
also means that it's nigh-impossible to design or predict success in this sort
of information distribution. When your content is made real or unreal by raw
imagination and social dynamics, most of it is, I think, a case of people
succeeding accidentally and claiming later that that's what they meant to do
all along. So it _can_ be powerful - but is almost impossible to control in an
organized way.

------
sickbeard
What an absurd article. Facebook is worldwide but somehow the US only
elections popped it's bubble? Not to mention this was a 50/50 opinion split..
not exactly earth shattering.

~~~
herbst
Well for one thing i never heard anyone using Facebook as news source, if U.S.
people really do that there is at least that.

Otherwise really absurd article, agreed.

~~~
renaudg
_i never heard anyone using Facebook as news source_

Well, that's one hell of a bubble you're living in.

~~~
herbst
I am sorry if this does not fit with your world view. In my environment
facebook is some social media platform, with a few uplifting news but mostly
irrelevant personal stuff. As anyone i am "friends" with way to many people
without a specific genre, so i dont think my feed is special in that regard.

There is barely political or relevant stuff on my feed, and as said i never
heard anyone say "did you read _that_ on facebook?" when talking about
something in the news.

If that helps you: my circle is mostly from Austria and Switzerland

~~~
renaudg
It's definitely not just my world view. According to some studies, 62% of
Americans are said to use FB as their _primary_ news source
([https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/62-people-now-use-facebook-
pr...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/62-people-now-use-facebook-primary-news-
source-why-we-conner-galway))

So it's not unreasonable to say you're inside a really special bubble, if
you've never heard anyone using Facebook as _a_ news source.

~~~
herbst
As mention, but i am glad to do it again. I AM NOT AMERICAN

Edit:// To further clearify: Nether are any of my facebook friends, nether
have i ever been there or plan to. I have no relation with the U.S. i was just
making the point that Facebook might simply is not the right place to find
information.

~~~
renaudg
I'm not American either. I'm French, living in the UK, and the figures are
probably not very different here.

~~~
herbst
Honestly, i can imagine the UK beeing not much different.

Around here Facebook lost its appeal some time ago and mutated to a semi
relevant social network. People (especially teens) use a lot Whatsapp &
Snapchat now. We mostly stopped having requests for facebook marketing
campaigns as well since a few years. And businesses slowly stopped to maintain
their Facebook sites.

Please dont project your english environment into my german bubble. Thanks

------
woodchuck64
Not just the left and right's echo-chambers, but those who attempt to actually
listen to reality got it wrong, too: FiveThirtyEight for example has been
using proven, reality-based statistics for a while and should have predicted
this result. (As it was, Silver was lambasted for being too generous on
Trump's chances.) At issue in this election is apparently a new idea: people
who hold positions that are being publically shamed tend to lie to pollsters.

~~~
Declanomous
I spent 5 years living in Wisconsin, and I've been telling everyone that Trump
would definitely win there. The week before the election, I actually went so
far as to say that I expected Hillary to win the popular vote, and Trump to
win the electoral college.

I wasn't predicting a Trump win out of bias. I'm very liberal, and my friends
are too. However, none of my friends believed me. I'm not going to say I was
confident in my prediction, but I thought the race was much closer than it
appeared. I talk to a lot of people in my job, and I could just tell that a
lot of people would be far more okay with Trump as a president than they were
willing to overtly say.

I'm not saying I'm some election analysis god, but I felt like people were
galvanizing Trump support by refusing to acknowledge Trump as a legitimate
candidate, which I think resonated with a lot of people who felt that their
concerns were not being taken legitimately. The HRC campaign focused on the
negative aspects of his campaign, but his support came from the fact that
people felt that Trump cared about their concerns.

~~~
woodchuck64
Makes sense. Now, how can Silver correct his methodology to capture the above
in future elections, I wonder.

~~~
maxxxxx
He should call it quits together with all other pollsters. All that predicting
is at best a totally useless activity or even worse, it influences voter
behavior. Bet on football games instead. At least that doesn't do damage to
the country.

~~~
551199
The main point of polls is to influence and give social proof to selected
candidate.

Don't believe me? When you look how they are constructed it becomes clear. Too
bad for Clinton campaign she was highly unlikable and even the most expensive
campaign in history couldn't help her.

~~~
maxxxxx
Agreed. All polling and media was totally skewed against Sanders (and then
Trump).

------
admstockdale
Some of this article is spot on.

There is a need in the internet age to educate people on how to consume
information. When we had fewer news organizations, information was more
controlled. It was done by professionals with years of training.

While there's a lot of benefit in providing more voices and more outlets,
there's a real danger of spreading misinformation propped up by false
equivalences as to what qualifies as a professional news organization. I'm not
sure the answer other than education.

------
Ftuuky
"If you liked that, you'll love this." \- Adam Curtis on his new documentary
Hypernormalisation. I really recommend it. You can also read this:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/03/goodies_and_ba...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/03/goodies_and_baddies.html)

------
overcast
As opposed to what? Some other major media outlet, pushing their own agenda on
previous elections? Give me a break.

~~~
webkike
Or maybe - just maybe - they report the news without opinion. Facebook injects
opinion into everything by it's very nature. Maybe that's not a good thing.

~~~
gipp
There is no such thing. Even if only through the selection of events
considered "newsworthy", reporting news _always_ implies a particular
narrative of the world, and politics is nothing but competing narratives.

~~~
webkike
What if the articles printed are randomly selected from a pool? Additionally,
I am talking about the content of the articles. News Papers for example
already have opinion pieces so the paper as a whole cannot be unbiased.
Additionally it is obvious that a news paper cannot print all of the news and
to some extent that betrays a bias, but no one expects a single news source to
contain all of the news in the entire world. My point is that articles
themselves are often unbiased, and blanket treatment of media networks as
biased is not a fair statement.

------
wyager
> Facebook didn’t just reflect your views back to you

Hardly. I'd say it accurately represented the view distribution of my social
group, which I infrequently agree with.

> But beyond that, it turns a blind eye to the nature of the content within
> its walls.

Is this article claiming that FB should censor _more_? It's also wrong; I know
of several Facebook pages that have been unpublished for being politically
unsavory (from Facebook's perspective, of course).

I'm not exactly sure what this article is supposed to convince us of.

~~~
utternerd
Completely agree this was a ridiculous article, but it's also what I'd expect
from TC.

------
CodeGenie
Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation on its
platform.

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/facebook-admits-it-must-
do...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/facebook-admits-it-must-do-more-to-
stop-the-spread-of-misinformation-on-its-platform/)

------
DubiousPusher
Why is this hard for people to get. "I can't believe it," is a figure of
speech not a statement of fact.

Most of us are shocked that this could happen not that it did happen.

~~~
ptaipale
Do you mean that even if Clinton would have won the election, you would still
have been shocked? Because even if she did win, Trump _could_ have won, as
many pollsters predicted he has a double-digit chance of winning?

~~~
DubiousPusher
Without reservation yes. I have been in a state of shock for months now. The
frustration of the reality is what makes it bubble over into visible
outpourings.

My assumption wasn't that because no one I interacted with on social media was
supporting him therefore he can't win.

My assumption was that people are too basically decent for him to win.

There's a lot of ground between knowing something can happen and being
emotionally prepared for it to happen.

------
gremlinsinc
Yeah because, all the other news outlets predicted a trump win... this is a
shit piece article... Show me one outlet that gave Mr. Trump > 50% chance of
winning (Fox doesn't count as news). If anything this is more the fault of bad
pollsters, and people not realizing that 4 million Bernie or Bust voters were
real and not just spouting empty promises. I was one of those.

I wrote in Bernie, and I'd rather have Trump and a rebuild the DNC from
scratch -- from the far left, than see Clinton -- the epitome of corruption
rise to power. We might as well let mob-bosses run for President.

~~~
jerf
"Show me one outlet that gave Mr. Trump > 50% chance of winning (Fox doesn't
count as news)."

I actually don't recall Fox predicting it either.

But isn't it kind of weird that you both supposed they were the only ones who
might have gotten it correct, but _also_ that they were not "real news"?
Didn't "real news" just let you down hardcore?

It doesn't do any good to say "The deviation of reporting from reality means I
have to re-examine my views" if you secretly include the caveat "as long as
none of my views have to change".

That said, I've got no particular reason to give you that Fox should be given
any more credit than any other major news source. But I'd submit that isn't
because you should give Fox more credit, but because you should adjust your
view of the others to match your current view of Fox. There isn't that huge a
difference between Fox and, say, CNN. But there's a lot more people who will
mouth agreement with that sentence, but then don't follow through with their
actions. CNN is _trash_ , and it's _more_ dangerous for those who are
generally inclined to agree with them than those who aren't. And so on for all
or at least almost all of the other "real news sources". You need to follow
through, stop watching, stop trusting things they say, and _really_ stop
trusting things they say that make you feel good.

(BTW, as for "what's my suggestion" then, at the moment I don't have a place I
can point at and say "If they say it, I trust it.")

------
aikah
So basically Facebook shows its users content they want to see. How is it a
problem? if I have specific centers of interests, I don't want Facebook to
show something I'm not interested in. Not because I want to live in an echo
chamber BUT because I'dd have to filter content manually which is time
consuming. There is nothing wrong with how Facebook works. The goal of
Facebook is make money through ads, it's not a charity or a governmental
agency (well, that's debatable). My point is Facebook needs to retain users or
they'll go somewhere else.

------
Alex3917
The biggest problem with our country isn't the people who voted for Trump,
it's the people who are surprised that he won. For what it's worth, here is an
email conversation about this that I submitted to HN before the election:

[https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/e1rtmBSJR16mkcCRlqmWwQ/lifehac...](https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/e1rtmBSJR16mkcCRlqmWwQ/lifehack-
newsfeed-liking)

~~~
pmoriarty
If you were cynical, you would have predicted that the United States, a
country full of racists and bigots, would never elect a black man for
President. But they did: twice.

There were good reasons to predict that George W Bush, an embarrassing,
arrogant, stupid buffoon who got the country in to two disastrous wars and
failed to prevent 9/11, who had massive protests against him from all over the
country would not get elected for a second term. But he did (arguably with the
help of voting fraud, but regardless of how he got there, he still served a
second term).

Many were surprised when an actor, Ronald Reagan, was elected as President.
Another actor was elected Governor of California, and arguably may have become
President had he been born in the US. A wrestler became Governor of Minnesota.

Most analysts, and even American intelligence agencies, were shocked by the
swift downfall of the Soviet Union.

In the 1960's, when Segregation was in full swing, many could not imagine that
it would ever end. They thought, as the song goes, "That's just the way it is.
Some things will never change". But it did end, and in relatively short order.
Some argue the US is still not fully desegregated, but in many important ways
it is.

For my part, when Bush Jr managed to get a second term in office, I stopped
trying to predict the political future. So now I'm no longer surprised. Any
idiot or asshole can get elected President in the US, and anything, no matter
how unlikely, can happen.

It reminds me of when the Yippies nominated a pig for President.[1] They did
it as a joke, but the US has been headed in that direction ever since.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigasus_%28politics%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigasus_%28politics%29)

~~~
hga
_Many were surprised when an actor, Ronald Reagan, was elected as President.
Another actor was elected Governor of California, and arguably may have become
President had he been born in the US._

Urrrmm, did you know that Reagan was the Governor of California for 2 terms,
from 1967 to 1974?

------
draw_down
No, it just succeeded wildly. A lot of pundits and media types now need to go
back and re-examine their thinking, because almost all of them were wrong
about everything. Stop listening to them, because they are naive people who
think themselves worldly but they don't understand the present moment nor the
future. They all need to go.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb's Twitter and Medium are excellent reads these days.

------
paradite
Not new at all. I wrote a piece in 2014 on Hong Kong's protest talking about
the exact same issue of Facebook:

[https://paradite.com/2014/11/11/internet-polarized-
society/](https://paradite.com/2014/11/11/internet-polarized-society/)

------
ianai
I think the cities and the small rural areas need a project to work on
together. My suggestion would be infrastructure projects. Hire the people
locally and from the city in masses.

------
partycoder
There was an assumption that Bernie voters would go to Clinton, but instead
some of them didn't vote or went third party.

In swing states, 1% more votes could have made the difference. Florida for
instance was very close.

In addition, the democratic party acted in a very biased way against Bernie.
Superdelegates also didn't care about what candidate was more popular in each
state.

------
thewhitetulip
I find it funny that those who vouched for free speech have been trashing
Trump's supporters all this election, too much talk for free speech eh?

~~~
gipp
I'm not sure what you're talking about? Free speech is about legality of
speech; nobody's talked about locking anyone up for supporting a candidate.

~~~
ptaipale
Locking up isn't the only way to punish people. There's actually some talk
about e.g. firing someone from his/her job for supporting a candidate.
Recently, there was a long discussion chain in HN about how Y Combinator
should sever any ties to Peter Thiel because he supported Trump. That Thiel
"should be fired".

Discrimination at work may also be about free speech.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12733024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12733024)

~~~
iamcasen
Right, and it's not because Trump is a republican. That's what people keep
missing. Trump is a man who has openly incited violence against ethnic groups!
Called for the deportation of muslims. He's called women fat pigs, and boasts
about how he screws people in business. He boasts about avoiding taxes! This
isn't GW, or McCaine...

Most organizations have a very understandable right to not want to be
associated with that. It's called a PR disaster. Somehow Trump is immune, and
I will never know how.

------
pascalxus
There's plenty of places you can get your news from that are less biased, or
not biased at all. No one is forcing you to read news on facebook.

------
sickbeard
Not to mention realclearpolitics and projectthirtyfive all had poll after poll
with all the number crunching data saying Clinton would win.

In the end..

clinton: 59,938,290 votes

trump: 59,704,886 votes

59million liked all new age sjw stuff

59million other people didn't

~~~
thewhitetulip
I find the electoral system in US to be funny. When 47.7% people voted for
Hillary and 47.5 voted from Donald, yet Donald won.

This is for the second time that Dems have lost this way, the last time was
during Al Gore vs Bush

~~~
ones_and_zeros
And they had 8 years to fix it but I don't think I heard a peep from them
about electoral reform.

~~~
nostrademons
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact)

Ratified by 10 blue states representing 165 electoral votes, and zero red
states. Most of the bluest states (CA, MA, NY, RI, DC, WA) ratified it during
the Obama administration.

------
herbst
Are they seriously trying to blame facebook for the voting result now?

~~~
ghouse
No, they're not. Read the article. Their research indicates Facebook shows you
news, even fabricated news that agrees with whatever you already believe.

~~~
herbst
I've read the article, it says that Facebook did favor Trump somehow and and
does passively suggest that they did this knowingly by showing other cases
where they did that.

I realize its not the complete message, but its appearantly the subtle message
they want to bring over.

~~~
nzjrs
Which article did you read?

------
w8rbt
I don't use Facebook, but no one I know was surprised by the outcome.

Bill Clinton was disbarred, impeached, and he sexually exploited young female
interns in the White house and was also accused of sexual crimes by many
women. Hillary Clinton defended him in all of these things.

The Clinton Foundation is a front (masquerading as a charity) for political
favors and payments. The Clintons are political/criminal cronies enriching
themselves while impoverishing others.

While they claim that average Americans are too 'uneducated' and 'low
information' (i.e. stupid) to understand these sophisticated political topics,
we all see right through it.

Enough is enough. Follow the same rules and laws that we all have to and treat
us fairly and we'll vote for you. Abuse us like this and we won't. It's that
simple.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_v._Jones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_v._Jones)

