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Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

#131

Post by jessaustin »

KirinDave wrote: post #128
jessaustin wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought they were trying to win back the House? One couldn't imagine a more evocative campaign issue, for independents suspicious of both parties like me. "We care about democracy and Paul Ryan doesn't! Tell Paul Ryan to restore trust to democracy!" OK, tell me that and I'll vote Democrat. Crickets.

You probably won't, but I'm not going to engage an obvious troll any further.

Is it the fact that I like Gabbard, or the fact that I voted for Bernie, which earns me such a commendation from such a valiant defender of the status quo (war) machine?

Re: Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

#132

Post by davvolun »

neuronexmachina wrote: post #41
tw04 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As evidenced by the gerrymandered districts intended to do things like sway presidential elections. Clearly the system is working as designed and not being cheated...

Gerrymandering sways House and state-level elections. It doesn't have a direct impact on Senate and Presidential elections.

NE-02 sent an electoral vote to Obama in 2008, whereas the other 4 NE votes went to McCain. In 2010, NE-02 was gerrymandered (arguably) and all 5 votes have gone to Romney (2012) and Trump (2016) since then.

Admittedly, that's sort of an exception that proves the rule. Only NE and ME don't operate under a winner-takes-all, they've so far only split their votes once each (2008 in NE and 2016 in ME), and their votes -- certainly splitting their votes -- has never impacted the result of a Presidential election.

Re: Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

#133

Post by davvolun »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #110
jessaustin wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly. The first scandal was easy for voters to see: closing Gitmo was kind of Obama's thing, from the very beginning of the primaries. The second scandal required a fair amount of investigation, but that investigation was fairly legible to voters. The third requires voters to believe what they're told by unnamed sources: thus far no one will go on the record with any proof of anything. The fourth should be easy…

> The first scandal was easy for voters to see: closing Gitmo was kind of Obama's thing, from the very beginning of the primaries. Campaign promises are usually seen as best effort. Are we still waiting for Mexico to pay for that wall? > The second scandal required a fair amount of investigation, but that investigation was fairly legible to voters. Yes, it is very straight forward and the FBI went over it multiple ti…

That's an interesting corollary... Hanlon's razor applies to sentencing, but not to guilt.

Re: Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

#134

Post by jessaustin »

throwawayyx96 wrote: post #42
bshastry wrote: post #21

I like the critical thinking in this article. Problem is, I am critical about it's critique. Just because Ted Cruz made use of the same platform and did not win, does not mean there is no problem with what Facebook is doing. They are still thieving people's data and selling it for a nice sum.

I don't think the author was trying to excuse Facebook's business model by bringing up Cruz. She was pointing out that if this 'psychological profiling' technique from CA was really a silver bullet for swaying votes, Cruz would have done better in his run the Republican nomination. It's a single data point that arguably isn't worth much, but it was interesting to me as I'd not heard of any other prominent politicians…

I thought Cruz came in 2nd? To the guy who was on every channel of TV all the time. Keep in mind R primary voters get more of their news from TV than the general electorate, which explains why Trump beat Cruz more than he beat Clinton. Keep in mind also that Cruz is a total pariah in Washington. The only people who will talk to him are those who are paid to do so. Based on previous form, one would not have expected Jeb and the rest to all lose to Trump and Cruz.

Re: Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

#135

Post by jessaustin »

maxerickson wrote: post #94
neuronexmachina wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he's just overtooting his own horn, but CA's CEO claimed differently: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/cambridge-analytica-claimed-... > In the video posted by Channel 4, Nix is heard saying that the company did much of the work behind Trump's campaign, which resulted in a shocking upset victory over Hillary Clinton in November 2016. > "We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting,…

Yeah, that's why I say it's hard to get a read on it. There's also plenty of people claiming that they were crucial to the effort. This article seems pretty clear headed and makes the Nix quote sound like a sales pitch: https://www.wired.com/story/what-did-cambridge-analytica-rea...

Victory has a thousand fathers...

Re: Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

#136

Post by germinalphrase »

adventured wrote: post #46
ixtli wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to talk about social issues and politics and stuff but the more I do it in public the more I run into what feels like "politics-as-basketball." It's really begun to feel like team sports as opposed to a critical analysis of conditions and power analysis.

As I've gotten older and have seen enough side switches, I've found it increasingly astounding to watch how predictably the partisans memory wipe themselves about XYZ terrible thing that their side did. Now that the bad side - the side they're not on - is in power, they must protest that same XYZ thing. It's said that Trump is terrible with journalists (he is). And there's Obama's quiet, terrifying war on journalists…

This is not a defense of the behavior - but it's been strongly asserted that Obama's crackdown on whistleblowers and journalists has more to do with improved abilities to track document access and sharing than it does the explicit desire to confront whistleblowers and journalists. All presidents have wanted to minimize whistleblowing and critical journalism, we just have better tools to understand just who, exactly, accessed that version of the 'secret prison memo' on Feb. 23.

The investigations are more successful so more leakers and whistleblowers get caught.

Re: Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

#137

Post by dragonwriter »

jessaustin wrote: post #117
KirinDave wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this was a reasonable stance if you were a hardliner skeptic. But it's March 2018. 5 of Trump's senior campaign staff are indicted. Multiple Russian actors are indicted. The Russian government doesn't even deny it, Putin literally blamed Jewish people. CA's c staff was just on video talking about using human trafficking to compromise politicians and their CEO just disclosed that some state governments were coop…

All this is astride the long understood fact that American election security is so bad that there aren't reliable records to disprove a machine that's been tampered with. In this context, is it curious that no one has signed on to co-sponsor the following bill? https://congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/5147/tex...

> In this context, is it curious that no one has signed on to co-sponsor the following bill?

No one has signed on to HR 5147 because everyone (84 members, all Democrats) who cares enough about election security to cosponsor a bill on it has instead signed on to cosponsor HR 5011 [0], which is a much broader election security bill; to the extent the specific requirements in HR 5147 are desirable and not address by HR 5011, they probably make more sense as an amendment to HR 5011.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/5011...

Re: Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

#138

Post by seanmcdirmid »

davvolun wrote: post #133
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first scandal was easy for voters to see: closing Gitmo was kind of Obama's thing, from the very beginning of the primaries. Campaign promises are usually seen as best effort. Are we still waiting for Mexico to pay for that wall? > The second scandal required a fair amount of investigation, but that investigation was fairly legible to voters. Yes, it is very straight forward and the FBI went over it multiple ti…

That's an interesting corollary... Hanlon's razor applies to sentencing, but not to guilt.

"It depends", some offenses require malice, some can driven by negligence and ignorance alone. I'm not sure what category the Hatch Act is in.

Re: Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

#139

Post by dragonwriter »

jessaustin wrote: post #126
KirinDave wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People could kick up a big stink about it, but the reason it won't go anywhere is that Ryan can hold it in committee in perpetutity. , isn't it? The voting machine observations aren't new. They're old, some dating back to Bush-era elections. I think technological illiteracy and States refusing to replace costly machines represent the bulk of the opposition.

I thought they were trying to win back the House? One couldn't imagine a more evocative campaign issue, for independents suspicious of both parties like me. "We care about democracy and Paul Ryan doesn't! Tell Paul Ryan to restore trust to democracy!" OK, tell me that and I'll vote Democrat. Crickets.

> I thought they were trying to win back the House? One couldn't imagine a more evocative campaign issue, for independents suspicious of both parties like me. "We care about democracy and Paul Ryan doesn't! Tell Paul Ryan to restore trust to democracy!"

And that’s the electoral (as opposed to policy) side of why 84 of them are cosponsoring a much broader election security bill than Gabbard’s HR 5147 (and, to be clear, one that was introduced before Gabbard’s “me too” bill.)

Re: Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

#140

Post by jessaustin »

tyu100 wrote: post #69

Beautiful article. The moral panic around social media is getting ridiculous, and as mentioned in this article and elsewhere, there's very little evidence that any of the C.A. targeting had any measurable effect on anything.

It is a moral panic, but since the likely outcome is fewer people using Facebook, which is an awful blight on humanity, that's fine.
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