Posted on 11/11/2016 8:04:23 PM PST by Lorianne
Yeah, okay, I know there are a million and one "hot takes" going on across the media about what happened yesterday and "what went wrong." I already wrote about what the election means for tech policy and civil liberties, but the trite setup of the blame game is getting really stupid, really fast. I had already started writing up a response to this silly Vox article about how "Facebook is harming our democracy" before the election (the story came out over the weekend), but now that I'm seeing more and more people (especially in the media) blaming Facebook and "algorithms" for the results of the election, I'm turning it into this post: if you're blaming Facebook for the results of this election, you're an idiot.
Facebook's algorithm and whatever "echo chamber" or "filter bubble" or whatever it may have created did not lead to this result. This was the result of a very large group of people who are quite clearly -- and reasonably -- pissed off at the status quo. Politics has been a really corrupt game for basically ever, and for the past few decades, lots of people have been trying to pretend it wasn't as corrupt as it really is. The fact that Trump is likely to be as corrupt -- if not more so -- than those who came before him didn't matter. People were upset and voted against a candidate who, to them, basically defined the status quo and the problems with the system. This was a "throw the bums out" vote, and many of the bums deserved to be thrown out. That they voted in someone likely to be worse (especially given who he's surrounded himself with so far) wasn't the point. Just as with Brexit, this was a vote of "what we have now ain't working, let's try something different."
It's no surprise many people argued that Clinton was the wrong candidate to go against Trump. She absolutely was. She was the status quo candidate in a time when lots and lots of people didn't want the status quo.
But that's not Facebook's fault. And the idea that a better or different algorithm on Facebook would have made the results any different is just as ridiculous as the idea that newspaper endorsements or "fact checking" mattered one bit. People are angry because the system has failed them in many, many ways, and it's not because they're idiots who believed all the fake news Facebook pushed on them (even if some of them did believe it). Many people don't think Trump will be any good, but they voted for him anyway, because the status quo is broken.
SNIP
The democraps had a bad establishment candidate who thought the presidency was an entitlement.
Problem for them was we had Free Republic, Drudge, Diamond and Silk and our own net this time.
Freepers can sniff out a scam or a lie in a second !
I'm hopeful that if he is successful he will begin a trend of capable leaders helping to govern the country rather than the career politicians whose primary skill is getting elected.
Facebook and Google were totally in the tank for Hillary. Twitter as well.
Along with FR and Drudge, I’d credit Reddit with generating a ton of viral media. Word of mouth, Wikileak examination, MEMES, etc. Reddit was really THE Trump ground zero for this campaign.
Paid CTR shills tried to attack them, but you can’t beat back 250,000 actual rabid fans with b.s.
Reddit consistently broke NEW stories and information.
FR is more posting of existing stories — second wave by then and a day or two behind the curve.
Just my take on it.
This sentence shows that the author is an idiot.
There is no reason to think that Trump would become corrupt. Being a political outsider, he does not have the insider networks that feed so much of the corruption. Having earned a fortune through honest means, he is very unlikely to start taking bribes. If someone wants to claim that Trump is corruptible, they really need to say how, specifically. Otherwise, they are just making stuff up--like any typical fact-challenged leftist.
If FR has an eartnly buzz, it’s a quiet buzz. Just saying based on the amount of play its mention got in the Wikileaks.
However, spiritually, it may have a louder buzz. “And those who feared the Lord talked together, and God made a memorial.” [Paraphrase of bible]
See actually Facebook and Twitter was used against the democrats.
The MSM missed this. Thousands of us deplorables used these platforms to spread the wikileaks and project veritas stories and also to tell the truth about Trump's positions.
Social Media was a huge part of Trump's victory even though they tried to game the system against Trump and we knew we were winning that war when you would watch the emojis fly across the screen on live Trump and Hillary videos.
The thumbs up and heart emojis would tally up in the tens of thousands for Trump while a few thousand angry emojis is all he would get. And it was exactly the opposite for Hillary. Tens of thousands of Angry emojis would fly across the screen while just a few thousand thumbs up and heart emojis would show.
This happened every time a Live Hillary or Trump event was shown on Facebook. And the numbers of each emoji skewed higher and higher as more wikileaks and project veritas stories were shared on Twitter and Facebook. It was fascinating to witness.
Well the lefties have an odd twist on the idea of original sin. Their secular self-esteeming method is the method of salvation, purportedly, while traditional faiths such as Christianity have no effect.
But even that ought to fail, because Donald Trump is seemingly one of the most self-esteeming people on earth, or at least would be expected to be based on his history. If that is salvation, Donald Trump should be wearing a Yuge halo already.
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