
Silicon Valley Can’t Destroy Democracy Without Our Help - SirLJ
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/opinion/silicon-valley-democracy-russia.html
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godzillabrennus
Wasn’t Russia responsible for spending $100k or so on ads on Facebook?

Didn’t Hillary spend $1B on her media buy?

This reads like clickbait to me.

I didn’t vote for Trump but he’s demonstrably reducing government size and put
a strict constitutionalist on the Supreme Court.

The media needs to stop with sensationalist headlines like Russia alone caused
Hillary to lose.

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daveguy
Well, considering $1 spent on a US election by a foreign power is illegal the
comparative ad buys of the campaigns themselves aren't relevant. Also, the
0.1MM estimate from Facebook is a severe underestimate. Twitter id'ed ~20x
that.

~~~
adventured
There's also nothing new about that. The 1996 Clinton Campaign broke the law
by illegally taking piles of foreign Chinese money. The foreign money scandals
have followed the Clintons for decades, which has seen several of the money
runners arrested. Naturally nobody on the left has ever cared about any of
that.

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throw2016
You can't 'protect' democracy by dismissing the electorate as mindless idiots.

Either you take the position adults can make up their own minds or you
dismantle democracy and media as voters are easily influenced and cannot be
trusted. There is no literate argument to be found here.

This paranoia is now reaching hysteria, lies are repeated without any sort of
evidence as fact and all sorts of dubious agendas are being played out under
pretense. No one talking about this will admit they are personally influenced
but are happy to patronize everyone else.

~~~
FullMtlAlcoholc
>Either you take the position adults can make up their own minds or you
dismantle democracy and media as voters are easily influenced and cannot be
trusted.

Reducing the solution set to a binary is emblematic of the problems of the US
political system.

Another possible solution is to increase awareness of cognitive biases in
decision making and perhaps improving our educational system by elevating the
importance of critical analysis.

However, I steer towards the latter of your proposed solutions. That such a
large % of the voting public gets its news from facebook is depressing.

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sien
When George W Bush won the election it was all the fault of Fox News and right
wing radio.

Now that HRC lost the fault now lies allegedly with social media and evil
foreigners.

It's like people blaming comic books, TV, rock music and video games for what
they see as the failings of youth.

Acknowledging that the Democrats chose poor candidates in Gore and Clinton and
that winning three Presidential terms in a row is hard is apparently harder
than blaming people for voting the 'wrong' way on some new media development.

~~~
akira2501
> When George W Bush won the election it was all the fault of Fox News and
> right wing radio.

I was pretty sure we're laying that one at the feet of the Florida State
Supreme Court.

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devinhelton
_In the last few months of the presidential campaign, a BuzzFeed analysis
concluded, fake news stories got more Facebook engagement than the most widely
read stories from major news outlets._

Isn't there a problem with this Buzzfeed analysis in that it assumes that the
engagement for fake news is actually real? We know that a ton of the
engagement for fake news is itself faked for ad fraud purposes --
[http://sadbottrue.com/article/profitable-info-
dump/](http://sadbottrue.com/article/profitable-info-dump/) \-- so I'm not
sure what we can learn from the raw numbers that Buzzfeed had access to.

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theyregreat
Scapegoats abound. It’s never the readers’ personal responsibility for
retweeting conspiracy theories, The Onion as fact or PR-manufactured articles.
Maybe NYT trying to get the InfoWars demographic / fly-over country back on
their side?

