Election 2016 (Page 68)

The hard left and the media learned NOTHING from this election.  That's a good thing.

We've been chatting about Trump and his potential limiting of access to the press, but I'm curious what you guys think about Obama's statements he made recently.

I've also seen a lot of talk about "fake news" and information power brokers such as Facebook and Twitter chiming in that they're going to start blocking "fake news".  Ironically the "fake news" that's been discussed for the most part is news that is a dissenting opinion of what they feel is the "right news". 

I don't know if any of you are on reddit, but their CEO is in a world of hot water because he started personally modifying the comments of Trump supporters to make it appear as thought they were calling the Trump moderators pedophiles.  Then when that started blowing up there was a multi-page discussion between the reddit admins about how they've put all these things in place to keep positive Trump stories stomped down so they aren't seen.
Reddit is the 27th most popular website on the internet and one of the premier places young adults get their news and the CEO and the admins are blatantly suppressing free speech for political gain and they got busted.

The DNC spent many decades and a lot of work to take over and infiltrate the traditional print and TV media.  Unfortunately the media world has changed and they're now attempting to do the same things with other online media through purchasing controlling interests in the companies and putting bigots in place to squelch as much dissenting opinion as possible.

Anyways, I'm curious what you guys think about all the suppression of speech going on?

Opinions are opinions and facts are facts.  If there's a "news" story going around that can be proven false, then it should be taken down.  Otherwise it just gets bad with people believing what they want to believe.  You see it all the time with some celebrity death hoax and then a flood of people harassing their families and friends.

It's interesting to note that while we do have slander and libel laws in the U.S., we haven't had the Supreme Court explicitly decide whether false statements are protected under the 1st amendment or not.

I do know large tech shops like Facebook have enough big data firepower that they can let machines do a lot of verification and take humans out of the equation, at least most of the time.  Which is a good thing.  And through that they can give some guidelines to writers (for example: don't be anonymous, cite your sources, label editorials properly, etc).

Too late, the cat is out of the bag.  Try reading some of the twitter accounts (a small portion of internet sites for sure) and replies from the people in the fringe movements.  Rumor is news now.....and we're not going back to anything like journalism.

would you still feel it's appropriate for those machines to only suppress progressive speech?  Even with the big media they blatantly lie continuously.  As an example CNN constantly said in both their hard news and commentary that trump said all Mexicans are rapists.  Blatant false, but everyone kept repeating it including several here.

So about that "accepting the election results"?

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-11-26/clinton-campaign-will-participate-in-stein-s-state-recounts

I love how the fake news was pumping the hacking of the vote machines narrative leading up to this, even though all of those states use paper ballots...  lol

Honestly I love that she is doing this because it's just destroying the DNC more and more.  Talk about the party of the millennial generation...
Maybe Trump could just give her a participation trophy and she and her supporters could be happy.

Look I know you hate CNN but every major news article I read quoted him word for word.  If CNN had inserted the word "all" at some point, then it certainly wasn't constant.  Should they have had the article removed and a penalty if they misquoted him?  Yes I agree with that.  Major news organizations should be held to a high standard.

All of that is way way down the line as far as this problem goes, though.  The fake news problem that we're talking about works like this:

a) someone with an agenda on a social media site makes a false claim, but crafts it like a legit article and links to some news URL or whatever, even though it's a site no one really knows about.
b) people who are reporters for their day job skim Twitter, Facebook, etc all the time.  They spot something like this and think they got scooped.  They rush to publish it without doing their homework.
c) other major media organizations see that "someone legit" put the story up, and think it must be vetted so it's true.  And they all report it.
d) some days later after the damage is done, the real news organizations post retractions.

This happens to both liberal and conservative outlets.

We're talking about stopping the crap at the source - which is social media.  I'm a software guy and I can tell you it's pretty easy to have code to spot things like (a).  It's not about the political slant -- it's about things like past history of the writer, links to sources he/she cited, image matching (lots of these things have images swiped from other media), stuff like that.

When you have as many users as Facebook does, the sheer volume of data allows you to train your big data model very very well.

And to LB: yes the rumor mill will always be there, but for another comparison from the software world, consider spam.

A friend and I operate our own mail server (no, we don't have classified data sorry ).  Between the two of us, that server has received something like 3500 spams since October.  I can't speak for him, but for me -- maybe 2 or 3 of those have made it past our filters.

That's just two software dudes running some off the shelf stuff with a bit of customization.  Facebook and Twitter could crush our efficiency.

I get where you're coming from and there is truly "fake news" that's blatantly garbage with plenty to go around on both sides.

The unfortunate part is that people have to make decisions on what news is fake or not and then write the software algorithms and apply them.  Virtually every big player on the internet information game is owned and ran by ultra liberal people.  Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit, you name it.
Here's an article in the Washington Times already showing how a partisan person is labeling opposing legitimate news sources as "fake news" in an effort to suppress opposing points of view.  With the stuff I mentioned above on Reddit, they are already labeling "The_Donald" subreddit as a fake news subreddit and attempting to squash it.  Fortunately for America they got caught trying to do it.

You wold hear nothing but a giant cheer from me if twitter, facebook, reddit, etc. all went the way of the dodo bird.  I don't give a rats arse about any of that.  We are not better off with any of it.

And yeah, rumor has always been there......but it's never been taken by "the masses" as actual news.  The only thing I can figure is that those internet spaces are inhabited, to a large degree, by idiots.

rhink of them as the New York Times and CNN for the 35 and under crowd.  They don't get their media from traditional news the way that you and I do.

on Reddit they call this election the great MEME war of 2016 because so much public opinion among the younger generation is shaped by memes and short clips that go viral.

for example this YouTube and thousands of variations went crazy viral and shaped the opinion towards Hillary.  Hillary can run ads bashing trump on TV for years and they won't have the same impact of a single viral YouTube.

https://youtu.be/Rg90PF4mWJs

such a good team, but similar to trump I'm really getting sick of all the winning.

At least they are progressing through the stages. Hannity was still in stage on in 2015. ??

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/01/12/sean_hannity_obamas_not_my_president.html

there's really two "alt-rights".  There's the people who wear trump hats and want to drain the swamp of corruption and then there's a tiny tiny minority of whack jobs.  The DNC media is trying to frame the vast majority as the same as the tiny minority and you're correct that it's a big mistake.  Fortunately for conservatives the media has learned nothing and seem to be going even further tinfoil hat so we may truly be seeing the literal death of the DNC.  Yay for America 

and tony, this is why you can't have a real conversation about this. every time there is evidence of something you don't like its manufactured by the DNC.

I'm afraid I find that to be mostly true.

I was originally opposed to the recounts; you lost, get over it.  But now that Trump has declared millions of people voted illegally and there's serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire, and California, clearly we need a full recount. Every state, every county. Shoot, let's just throw out the first election entirely and all vote again. LOL