Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged election

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Covering politics in a "post-truth" America | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...litics-in-a-post-truth-america

post-truth politics journalism media fake news crisis culture news trump

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
  • Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.
  • I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)
  • Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year
  • the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
  • Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.
  • none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.
  • This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.
  • To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.
  • Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.
  • Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.
  • This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.
  • I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.
  • In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”
  • Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.
  • I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.
  • And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.
  • Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.
  • These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.
  • , we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.
  • politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth
  • Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.
  • As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.
  • And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.
  • When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.
  • when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!
  • By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.
  • in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.
  • So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.
  • 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
Javier E

The Disgust Election - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-disgust-election.html

election financing rich corruption supreme court oligarchy campaign politics

shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • I would like for the most influential swing voter on the Supreme Court to step away from his legal aerie, and wade through some of the muck that he and four fellow justices have given us with the 2014 campaign.
  • How did we lose our democracy? Slowly at first, and then all at once. This fall, voters are more disgusted, more bored and more cynical about the midterm elections than at any time in at least two decades.
  • beyond disdain for this singular crop of do-nothings, the revulsion is generated by a sense that average people have lost control of one of the last things that citizens should be able to control — the election itself.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • You can trace the Great Breach to Justice Kennedy’s words in the 2010 Citizens United case, which gave wealthy, secret donors unlimited power to manipulate American elections. The decision legalized large-scale bribery — O.K., influence buying — and ensured that we would never know exactly who was purchasing certain politicians.
  • Kennedy famously predicted the opposite. He wrote that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” That’s the money quote — one of the great wish-projections in court history. But Kennedy also envisioned a new day, whereby there would be real-time disclosure of the big financial forces he unleashed across the land.In his make-believe, post-Citizens United world, voters “can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”
  • just the opposite has happened. The big money headed for the shadows. As my colleague Nicholas Confessore documented earlier this month, more than half the ads aired by outside groups during this campaign have come from secret donors. Oligarchs hiding behind front groups — Citizens for Fluffy Pillows — are pulling the levers of the 2014 campaign, and overwhelmingly aiding Republicans.
  • you can’t argue with the corrosive and dispiriting effect, on the rest of us, of campaigns controlled by the rich, the secret, the few.
  • This year, the Koch brothers and their extensions — just to name one lonely voice in the public realm — have operations in at least 35 states, and will spend somewhere north of $120 million to ensure a Congress that will do their bidding. Spending by outside groups has gone to $1 billion in 2012 from $52 million in 2000.
  • At the same time that this court has handed over elections to people who already have enormous power, they’ve given approval to efforts to keep the powerless from voting. In Texas, Republicans have passed a selective voter ID bill that could keep upward of 600,000 citizens — students, Native Americans in federally recognized tribes, the elderly — from having a say in this election.
  • What’s the big deal? Well, you can vote in Texas with a concealed handgun ID, but not one from a four-year college. The new voter suppression measure, allowed to go ahead in an unsigned order by the court last Saturday, “is a purposefully discriminating law,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent, “one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hun
  • With the 2010 case, the court handed control of elections over to dark money interests who answer to nobody. And in the Texas case, the court has ensured that it will be more difficult for voters without money or influence to use the one tool they have.
katherineharron

2020 election: Experts are warning coronavirus puts integrity the election at risk. Her... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • As states scramble to delay their spring primaries, election professionals and voting experts are anxiously looking ahead to November and warning that the coronavirus pandemic is already threatening the safety and integrity of the next presidential election.
  • Congress took a step forward this week by approving $400 million in federal grants that states can use to make coronavirus-related adjustments for the general election. But the two parties couldn't reach a deal on the politically-charged question of how to overhaul the voting laws.
  • "At all costs, the election must go on," said CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. "This is not the NBA season or the Olympics. Come November, we've got to vote. If we can vote in the middle of the Civil War, and if Franklin D. Roosevelt can run for an unprecedented fourth term in the middle of World War II, then we can figure out how to make 2020 a free and fair election."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • More than 136 million Americans voted in 2016, and a record number of them cast early ballots. But nearly 60% of voters still showed up on Election Day, waited in long lines, used communal pens and touched the same voting machines -- all dangerous moves in the coronavirus era.
Javier E

"Falsehood Flies, And Truth Comes Limping After It" - 0 views

morningshots.thebulwark.com/...-flies-and-truth-comes-limping

truth falsehood lies gop culture trump history swift politics

shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • “I traced a throughline: from Sandy Hook to Pizzagate to QAnon to Charlottesville and the coronavirus myths to the election lie that brought violence to the Capitol on January 6th,” she told Vox earlier this year. “I started to understand how individuals, for reasons of ideology or social status, tribalism, or for profit, were willing to reject established truths, and how once they’d done that, it was incredibly difficult to persuade them otherwise.”
  • She describes the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, CT as “a foundational moment in the world of misinformation and disinformation that we now live in.”
  • the NYT’s Elizabeth Williamson about her book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, which was recently named one of the best books of 2022 by Publishers Weekly.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “The struggle to defend objective truth against people who consciously choose to deny or distort it has become a fight to defend our society, and democracy itself.”
  • Jonathan Swift, it’s worth noting that he was not an optimist about “truth.”
  • By the time a lie is refuted, he wrote, “it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect: like a man, who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who has found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.'“
  • “Considering that natural disposition in many men to lie, and in multitudes to believe,” he wrote in 1710, “I have been perplexed what to do with that maxim so frequent in every body's mouth; that truth will at last prevail.
  • A recent Washington Post tally found that nearly 300 Republicans running for congressional and state offices are election deniers. That means, as a FiveThirtyEight analysis found, 60 percent of Americans will have at least one election denier on their ballot next week.
  • In a new USA Today/Suffolk University poll, 63 percent of Republicans say they worry “the election results could be manipulated.”
  • From the New York Times: When asked, six Trump-backed Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in midterm battlegrounds would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.
  • The big mistake people have made is in assuming this could blow up only in an extensive struggle in 2024 and perhaps involving Donald Trump. What seems entirely unanticipated, yet is extremely predictable, is that smaller skirmishes could break out all over the country this year.
  • Democrats have got themselves in a situation where the head of their party holds the most popular position on guns and crime—and yet they’re getting crushed on the issue because they’ve let GOP campaign ads, the right wing media ecosystem, and assorted progressive big city prosecutors shape the narrative on the issue rather than doing so themselves.
mshilling1

Can The Forces Unleashed By Trump's Big Election Lie Be Undone? : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...mps-big-election-lie-be-undone

shared by mshilling1 on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Eight in 10 Republicans disagree that Trump is to blame for the violence, don't believe social media companies should continue restrictions on him and don't trust that results of the 2020 election were accurate.
  • Trump whipped up his supporters, repeating a false claim that he has made over and over in the weeks since Nov. 3: "We won this election, and we won it by a landslide," he insisted. "This was not a close election!"
  • That's despite no evidence of widespread fraud and Trump's own administration saying the election was the "most secure in American history."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "The degree to which it becomes corrosive is in direct proportion to the number of people who say it."
  • Trump has continued to claim falsely that the election was stolen and rigged, repeating that message to tens of millions of his followers. That was amplified by conservative media in the lead-up to the violence Jan. 6
  • Almost all Democrats (92%) trust the results, as do a majority of independents (56%). But just 1 in 5 (20%) of Republicans do; a whopping 78% do not.
  • By a 50%-43% margin, Americans do not think social media companies should continue to restrict Trump's use of their platforms beyond his term as president.
Javier E

In This Snapchat Campaign, Election News Is Big and Then It's Gone - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...at-election-campaign-news.html

campaign election news journalism social media bias memory

shared by Javier E on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • Every modern presidential election is at least in part defined by the cool new media breakthrough of its moment.
  • In 2000, there was email, and by golly was that a big change from the fax. The campaigns could get their messages in front of print and cable news reporters — who could still dominate the campaign narrative — at will,
  • Then 2008: Facebook made it that much easier for campaigns to reach millions of people directly,
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The 2004 campaign was the year of the “Web log,” or blog, when mainstream reporters and campaigns officially began losing any control they may have had over political new
  • The question this year has been whether 2016 will be the “Snapchat election,
  • Snapchat represents a change to something else: the longevity of news, how durably it keeps in our brain cells and our servers.
  • Snapchat is recording the here and the now, playing for today. Tomorrow will bring something new that renders today obsolete. It’s a digital Tibetan sand painting made in the image of the millennial mind.
  • Snapchat executives say they set up the app this way because this is what their tens of millions of younger users want; it’s how they live.
  • They can’t possibly have enough bandwidth to process all the incoming information and still dwell on what already was, can they?
  • Experienced strategists and their candidates, who could always work through their election plans methodically — promoting their candidacies one foot in front of the other, adjusting here and there for the unexpected — suddenly found that they couldn’t operate the way they always did.
  • Marco Rubio’s campaign marched into the election season ready to fight the usual news-cycle-by-news-cycle skirmishes. It was surprised to learn that, lo and behold, “There was no news cycle — everything was one big fire hose,” Alex Conant, a senior Rubio strategist, told me. “News was constantly breaking and at the end of the day hardly anything mattered. Things would happen; 24 hours later, everyone was talking about something else.”
  • Then there was Jeb Bush, expecting to press ahead by presenting what he saw as leading-edge policy proposals that would set off a prolonged back-and-forth. When Mr. Bush rolled out a fairly sweeping plan to upend the college loan system, the poor guy thought this was going to become a big thing.
  • It drew only modest coverage and was quickly buried by the latest bit from Donald Trump.
  • In this “hit refresh” political culture, damaging news does not have to stick around for long, either. The next development, good or bad, replaces it almost immediately.
  • Mr. Miller pointed to a recent episode in which Mr. Trump said a protester at a rally had “ties to ISIS,” after that protester charged the stage. No such ties existed. “He says ‘ISIS is attacking me’; this was debunked in eight minutes by Twitter,” Mr. Miller said. “Cable talked about it for three hours and it went away.”
  • “Hillary Clinton said that she was under sniper fire in Bosnia” — she wasn’t — “and that has stuck with her for 20 years,”
  • Mr. Trump has mastered this era of short attention spans in politics by realizing that if you’re the one regularly feeding the stream, you can forever move past your latest trouble, and hasten the mass amnesia.
  • It was with this in mind that The Washington Post ran an editorial late last week reminding its readers of some of Mr. Trump’s more outlandish statements and policy positions
  • The Post urged its readers to “remember” more than two dozen items from Mr. Trump’s record, including that he promised “to round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and deport them,” and “lied about President Obama’s birth certificate.”
  • as the media habits of the young drive everybody else’s, I’m reminded of that old saw about those who forget history. Now, what was I saying?
adonahue011

Opinion | Take a Social Media Break Until You've Voted - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-election-misinformation.html

opinion new york times social media research technology education bias

shared by adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      This is an interesting idea to me because people are so set in their views, how staying on social media leading up to the election will affect their vote is a bit confusing.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      I think the idea of believing what you see on social media could be a logical fallacy. The idea of following the mases on a specific idea, or an authority figure
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      I think the idea of believing what you see on social media could be a logical fallacy. The idea of following the mases on a specific idea, or an authority figure
  • Americans who rely the most on social media to get their news are also far less likely to have accurate or complete knowledge of political events
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • 60 percent of people who primarily get their news from social media had minimal knowledge of current political events, according to the study, compared with 23 percent who primarily get their news directly from news websites or apps
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Very interesting statistic. I think social media allows for too much individual opinion when it comes to news. Our brains are very deceptive so I find it easy to believe things I personally read on social media.
  • 18- to 29-year-olds, 48 percent get most of their political news from social media sites
  • are breeding a generation of the misinformed — a situation that has only grown more dire at a time when the president spreads falsehoods about public health and the election.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      I don't agree with this at all. I think the younger generation is seeing the older generation use social media as a news outlet many times. This is the logical fallacy I previously mentioned.
  • while false information flows unimpeded through Facebook groups, user posts and advertisements.
  • The company says it will limit political advertising in the week before Election Day — but with huge numbers of mail-in ballots already being sent in around the country, that will amount to too little, too late.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      The writer of this article is very bias on this topic, at least facebook is trying to help.
  • “I don’t think there is any question at this point voters will be more informed by seeking out news brands they trust rather than spending their time on social media where it’s less than clear,”
  • Twitter sometimes forces users to first click through a warning that a tweet violates its rules on election integrity,
  • The problem with such posts is that they are widely spread, echoed and believed — and that happens far more quickly than moderators can react with a warning label.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      This is an important point which is why when we look at media we need to try and analyze it, and not allow ourselves to believe everything we read.
  • Mr. Trump that falsely claimed the seasonal flu is responsible for more deaths than coronavirus
  • here are many positives to social media, of course — particularly as millions of Americans struggle to stay connected during the coronavirus pandemic.
  • available more reliably elsewhere, from your local board of elections website and from good government groups
  • People believe them.
  • Social media is a cesspool
  • however, aren’t taking the threat of spreading misinformation seriously enough ahead of the election.
  • Stay off social media at least until you’ve voted.
sissij

The Voter Fraud Fantasy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-voter-fraud-fantasy.html

new york times social media bias

shared by sissij on 29 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Perhaps the most damaging was his insistence that millions of Americans voted illegally in the election he narrowly won.
  • What once seemed like another harebrained claim by a president with little regard for the truth must now be recognized as a real threat to American democracy.
  • That would allow state and national lawmakers to impose even tighter voting requirements, harming minorities, the young and the elderly, who tend to vote Democratic.
  • sissij on 29 Jan 17
     
    Trump's voter fraud fantasy has discussed frequently. In TOK class, I remember once we talked about an example of how the government policy may affect the result of the election. For example, the rule that people need to have an ID to vote may target African-American voters who doesn't have an ID. Although voter fraud is alleged by the election officials to be exceedingly rare, there are still a lot of factors that make the seemly fair election biased. --Sissi (1/29/2017)
Duncan H

Can Santorum Win in November? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/...can-santorum-win-in-november

bias language

shared by Duncan H on 29 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • If one were to invent a Republican politician whose background and beliefs were ideally suited to a general-election campaign against Barack Obama, that dream candidate would share a number of qualities with Rick Santorum.
  • He would hail from the Midwest – a region filled with recession-battered swing states where the president’s support is weaker than in the country as a whole. He would be a Catholic rather than an Evangelical or a Mormon, because the Catholic vote swings back and forth between the two parties in ways that other religious demographics don’t. He would have a strong personal and biographical connection to blue-collar whites, a bloc of voters whose support President Obama has always had difficulty winning. His record would be conservative enough to excite the Republican Party’s base, but leavened with enough moderation and even populism on economic issues to reassure anxious middle-income voters that the Republican Party doesn’t just exist to serve Wall Street and the rich.
  • Santorum checks all of these boxes, while Mitt Romney – his Michigan ties and attempts to play the tribune of the middle class notwithstanding – decidedly does not. Which is why, as Romney flails and Santorum rises, a few pundits have found themselves tiptoeing toward what seems like the most counterintuitive of all possible conclusions: The possibility that the long-shot former senator from Pennsylvania, not his supposedly more electable rival, might stand a better chance of winning in November.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • This idea seems laughable if you assume that most swing voters are fiscal conservatives and social moderates, allergic to culture-war appeals and pining for a dream ticket of Michael Bloomberg and Olympia Snowe. But as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has explained, there’s more than one kind of “moderate” in American politics:
  • There are, very roughly speaking, two kinds of swing voters. One kind is economically conservative, socially liberal swing voters. This is the kind of voter you usually read about, because it’s the kind most familiar to political reporters – affluent and college educated. But there’s a second kind of voter at least as numerous – economically populist and socially conservative. Think of disaffected blue-collar workers, downscale white men who love guns, hate welfare, oppose free trade, and want higher taxes on the rich and corporations. Romney appeals to the former, but Santorum more to the latter
  • That’s because the former senator has the instincts of an activist, rather than of a president or statesman.
  • a Rust Belt background would be a potential advantage for a Republican presidential candidate. But a Rust Belt background that includes an 17-point repudiation from the Pennsylvania electorate that knew Santorum best looks more like a liability instead.
  • both Catholicism and social conservatism are potential assets in a campaign against a president who has spoken condescendingly about Middle Americans who “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion.” But a Catholic conservatism that manifests itself in campaign-trail critiques of contraception promises to alienate many more voters (female voters, especially) than it attracts.
  • All things being equal, a populist style that’s at odds with the Acela corridor’s attitudes and values can often play well in the heartland. But no presidential candidate can succeed without a modicum of favorable media coverage, and so a successful populist needs to be able to disarm elite journalists (as Huckabee so expertly did, schmoozing on The Daily Show and elsewhere) as often as he alienates them. And nobody has ever used the word “disarming” to describe Rick Santorum’s approach to politics.
  • his political persona is worlds away from the Washington-New York definitions of “middle-of-the-road.” But a mix of social conservatism and economic populism has a great deal of general-election potential – especially in a contest against a president whose style of liberalism can seem professorial, condescending and aloof.
  • Whether the topic is social issues or foreign policy, his zeal exceeds his prudence, and as a result his career is littered with debating society provocations (referencing “man-on-dog” sex in an argument about gay marriage, using his doomed 2006 Senate bid to educate Pennsylvanians on the evils of Hugo Chavez, etc.) that have won him far more enemies than friends. His passion for ideas and argument often does him credit, but in a national campaign it would probably do him in.
  • Duncan H on 29 Feb 12
     
    Interesting article on Santorum's chances in the general election.
cvanderloo

Uganda Election: President Yoweri Museveni Declared Winner As Bobi Wine Alleges Fraud :... - 1 views

www.npr.org/...-winner-as-bobi-wine-alleges-f

Uganda Fruaud Museveni Wine

shared by cvanderloo on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni has won a sixth term in office, fighting off a challenge by former singer Bobi Wine
  • Wine's run drew many young Ugandans to pay attention to politics.
  • Museveni received 58% of the vote to 34% for Wine
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Wine is alleging that votes were rigged
  • Ahead of the vote, Museveni's government shut down social media outlets in Uganda
  • Wine said that security forces were not allowing anyone in or out of his home, and he urged Ugandans to reject the results.
  • called Uganda's electoral process "fundamentally flawed," citing "authorities' denial of accreditation to election observers, violence and harassment of opposition figures" and the arrest of civil service organization workers.
  • The election has been closely watched because of Wine's appeal to younger voters — a crucial strength in a country with one of the youngest populations in the world, where more than two-thirds of the population is under age 30.
  • Wine sought to replace one of Africa's longest-tenured leaders with one of its youngest, hoping to make a generational shift that would be felt across the continent.
  • This week, Wine said the military had killed his driver and that his home was raided.
  • Wine himself was arrested in November, sparking large protests during which dozens of people died.
  • A recent Gallup poll found that only around a third of respondents in Uganda said they're confident in the honesty of their country's elections.
  • "Uganda has never witnessed a peaceful transfer of power since gaining its independence in 1962."
  • But Wine is alleging that the vote was rigged, as election officials face questions over how results were tallied amid an Internet blackout, according to the AP.
  • In an interview with NPR, Wine said security forces were not allowing anyone in or out of his home, and he urged Ugandans to reject the results.
  • Wine became a pop star with music that blends Afrobeat with sounds borrowed from reggae and dancehall.
  • He then turned toward politics, winning a seat in parliament.
  • Museveni recently told NPR that he views pro-Wine demonstrators as "agents of foreign schemes."
  • This week, as ballots were being counted and the outcome of the 2021 vote hung in the balance, there were worries about what a transition of leaders might look like in the former British colony.
peterconnelly

How Some States Are Combating Election Misinformation Ahead of Midterms - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sheriff-election-midterms.html

new york times states election

shared by peterconnelly on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Ahead of the 2020 elections, Connecticut confronted a bevy of falsehoods about voting that swirled around online. One, widely viewed on Facebook, wrongly said absentee ballots had been sent to dead people. On Twitter, users spread a false post that a tractor-trailer carrying ballots had crashed on Interstate 95, sending thousands of voter slips into the air and across the highway.
  • the state plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting, and to create its first-ever position for an expert in combating misinformation.
  • With a salary of $150,000, the person is expected to comb fringe sites like 4chan, far-ri
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • ght social networks like Gettr and Rumble, and mainstream social media sites to root out early misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral, and then urge the companies to remove or flag the posts that contain false information.
  • These states, most of them under Democratic control, have been acting as voter confidence in election integrity has plummeted.
  • In an ABC/Ipsos poll from January, only 20 percent of respondents said they were “very confident” in the integrity of the election system and 39 percent said they felt “somewhat confident.”
  • Some conservatives and civil rights groups are almost certain to complain that the efforts to limit misinformation could restrict free speech.
  • “State and local governments are well situated to reduce harms from dis- and misinformation by providing timely, accurate and trustworthy information,” said Rachel Goodman
  • “Facts still exist, and lies are being used to chip away at our fundamental freedoms,” Ms. Griswold said.
  • Officials said they would prefer candidates fluent in both English and Spanish, to address the spread of misinformation in both languages. The officer would track down viral misinformation posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, and look for emerging narratives and memes, especially on fringe social media platforms and the dark web.
clairemann

Keep the Filibuster, There Are Better Ways to Reform | Time - 0 views

time.com/...libuster-better-ways-to-reform

world knowledge education bias

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • After passing an immense $1.9 trillion COVID aid package that was one of the most expensive and significant pieces of social legislation in a generation, the Biden administration realizes that much of the rest of its agenda—election reform, gun control, and civil rights—is dead on arrival in the Senate, a Senate that Democrats only narrowly control.
  • The reason, of course, is the filibuster, the procedural maneuver that allows 41 senators to block multiple forms of substantive legislation.
  • This would be a serious mistake that would enhance partisan polarization and increase political instability. There are better ways to achieve policy reform. There are better ways to lower the temperature of American politics.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • I discovered that thoughtful progressives and thoughtful conservatives each suffered from different, deep fears about our political future. Progressives feared minoritarian rule. Conservatives feared majoritarian domination. Ending the filibuster, perversely enough, makes both fears more real.
  • The Republican Party has won exactly one popular vote for president since 1988, George W. Bush’s narrow 2.4 percent edge over John Kerry in 2004. Yet it won three presidential elections in that span of time
  • Republicans not only have a present electoral college advantage over Democrats, they also have inherent advantages in both the House and the Senate.
  • Do away with the filibuster, and it’s entirely possible that the next Republican government could enjoy immense legislative power without a majority of the popular vote. In fact, they could lose voters by margins numbering in the millions, yet still exercise decisive control over the government.
  • The Democratic Party is seeking to pass laws that would introduce dramatic changes in American elections, transform free speech doctrine, and potentially limit religious liberty.
  • The GOP, for example, is currently in the grips of a Trumpist base that prioritizes angry opposition over compromise. The party largely lacks a positive agenda, so (with some notable exceptions) its priority is clear: No compromise, even when compromise might be prudent. Stop the Democrats. Some Republicans have gone further, descending into a fantasy world of dark conspiracies.
  • Yes, through decentralization, de-escalation, and strategic moderation.
  • That means most Americans live in jurisdictions where, for example, election rules, civil rights laws, gun laws, and a wide variety of economic and social policies are within their partisan control.
  • Gridlock in Washington does not have to mean gridlock in government,
  • Research demonstrates that a majority of Americans are exhausted by partisan politics. Motivated minorities drive most American polarization.
  • A combination of redistricting reform and voting reforms like ranked-choice voting can limit the powers of partisan extremists. Ranked-choice voting—which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference—most notably can reduce the chances of highly-partisan pluralities dominating political primaries.
  • The answer to polarization and gridlock is not partisan escalation. Ending the filibuster would only ramp up partisan acrimony and increase the level of fear and anxiety around American elections. There are better paths through American division. We should try those before we enable drastic measures like majoritarian dominance or minoritarian control.
anonymous

Opinion | What Are Republicans So Afraid Of? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ublican-voter-suppression.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • What Are Republicans So Afraid Of?
  • Instead of conspiracy-mongering about an election they did well in, they could try to win real majorities.
  • There was a time, in recent memory, when the Republican Party both believed it could win a national majority and actively worked to build one.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Whether shrewd or misguided, cynical or sincere — or outright cruel and divisive — these gambits were each part of an effort to expand the Republican coalition as far as it could go without abandoning Reaganite conservatism itself.
  • It was the work of a self-assured political movement, confident that it could secure a position as the nation’s de facto governing party.
  • There is no such ambition, or confidence, in today’s Republican Party.
  • Republicans have made it their mission to restrict the vote as much as possible.
  • Conservative grass-roots and political action groups are joining the crusade, according to reporting by my newsroom colleague Jeremy Peters, galvanized into action by the former president, who blames nonexistent fraud and illegal voting for his defeat.
  • “So here’s the good news: There is action taking place to go back and correct what was uncovered in this last election.”
  • “It kind of feels like an all-hands-on-deck moment for the conservative movement, when the movement writ large realizes the sanctity of our elections is paramount and voter distrust is at an all-time high,”
  • H.R. 1’s only objective is to ensure that Democrats can never again lose another election, that they will win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of the state legislatures for the next century,”
  • Some of this is undoubtedly cynical, a brazen attempt to capitalize on the conspiratorial rhetoric of the former president. But some of it is sincere, a genuine belief that the Republican Party will cease to exist if it cannot secure “election integrity.”
  • If Republicans could break themselves of Trump and look at last November with clear eyes, they would see that their fears of demographic eclipse are overblown and that they can compete — even thrive — in the kinds of high-turnout elections envisioned by voting rights activists.
  • Indeed, the great irony of the Republican Party’s drive to restrict the vote in the name of Trump is that it burdens the exact voters he brought to the polls.
  • Under Trump, the Republican Party swapped some of the most likely voters — white college-educated moderates — for some of the least likely — blue-collar men.
  • In other words, by killing measures that make voting more open to everyone, Republicans might make their fears of terminal decline a self-fulfilling prophecy.
lucieperloff

Mexico's President Appears To Hold Key Majority In Elections : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-key-majority-elections-morena

bias politics election coronavirus congress

shared by lucieperloff on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • but fell short of a two-thirds majority as some voters boosted the struggling opposition, according to initial election results.
  • will have to rely on votes from its allies in the Workers Party and Green Party,
  • The results give the president sufficient budgetary control to continue his train and refinery-building plans and cash handout programs,
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Those would be gains for those parties, which have often appeared rudderless in the face of López Obrador's popularity.
  • López Obrador's critics had depicted the elections as a chance to stop the still-popular president from concentrating more power and weakening checks and balances.
  • Representatives of the major parties speaking at the electoral institute's general council meeting applauded the conduct of Sunday's vote amid the pandemic
  • he might try to subjugate courts and regulatory agencies created during Mexico's decades-long transition to full democracy.
  • hree dozen candidates were killed during the campaigns; almost all of the victims were running for one of the 20,000 local posts including mayors and town council up for grabs in 30 states.
  • López Obrador has raised minimum wages and strengthened government aid programs like supplementary payments to the elderly, students and training programs for youths.
  • The elections represent the first mass public events since the coronavirus pandemic hit the country over a year ago,
pier-paolo

How To Avoid Election Stress - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...election-stress.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “We’re seeing a huge increase in the need for mental health services,”
  • “One of the very few things that remains, and not only remains but is heightened, is our political standing,”
  • “I think that people are way more polarized even within their families and essential groups than they ever have been before.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Uncertainty produces anxiety, but you can counter that, in part, by understanding what to expect on Election Day this year.
  • This year, Dr. Tillery observed, there’s a significant chance the presidential election will not be called on Tuesday night.
  • “Voters should get some comfort from knowing that we do have counting procedures and auditing procedures and voter notification procedures that would make it better for us to be calm and let those processes play out,”
  • Other analog activities can help you cope, too. “Anxious thoughts race by,” Dr. Stosny said, “and the faster they go, the less realistic they get.” Instead of dwelling on them, write them out longhand; this will slow down and moderate their frenetic pace. Next to each source of fear, write down how you’ll respond to it.
  • Be on the lookout for viral disinformation: Check the provenance of news articles or memes making polarizing political claims or calling the election before a mainstream news outlet has done so.
  • “Humans are quite resilient,” she said. “There’s a strong possibility that you will be able to cope.”
  • f a family member approaches you with anger, try to respond with compassion. Consider setting a time limit on your political discussions, Dr. Lee said, agreeing in advance to a fun, shared activity when your time is up.
  • If you’re feeling anxious or overwhelmed, or need to take time out of a challenging conversation, go for a walk or run, and try to spend at least 30 minutes outside.
  • 68 percent of adults report finding the election to be a significant source of stress. This is due, at least in part, to the vitriol and name-calling exhibited by candidates,
  • “One of the things Covid has made abundantly clear in so many aspects of our life is that we have a lot of cracks in the system,”
  • “This is the first step in a long journey of really reimagining what America is going to look like and what America is going to be about,” Ms. Holland said. “That’s not going to end when the voting does.”
lucieperloff

Opinion | What Keeps Facebook's Election Security Chief Up at Night? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...acebook-election-security.html

social media technology knowledge bias

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Others, including President Trump and his campaign, have used the platform to spread false information about voting while some partisans try to undermine the public’s faith in the U.S. election system.
  • cybersecurity, which is hacking, phishing and exploiting Facebook’s technical assets. The other is influence operations, which is both foreign (Russia, Iran, China) and domestic actors manipulating public debate with disinformation or in other ways.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      both different and both prevalent
  • That’s also because government organizations, civil society groups and journalists are all helping to identify this.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      people are working together for the common good
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • We’ve seen Russian actors intentionally use content posted by innocent Americans. We see other people post and share content from Russian campaigns. It doesn’t mean they’re actually connected. In fact, most times they’re not.
  • Influence operations are essentially weaponized uncertainty.
  • One of the most effective countermeasures in all of this is an informed public.
  • And there are so many opportunities to leverage that complexity to run a perception hack. A perception hack is an attempt to create a perception that there is a large scale influence operation when in fact there is no evidence to support it.
  • It’s our job to keep this debate as authentic as possible by putting more information and context out there. We can force pages that are pushing information to disclose who is behind them
  • We are living through a historic election with so many complex pieces to monitor. The piece that I and my team can help with is that we can make sure we secure this debate.
  • My counterpart at Twitter says I call him more than his mother does. We’re spending lots of time and exchanging information to try and stay ahead of this.
  • Between 2016 and next week we’ll have worked to protect more than 200 elections across the world. It’s critical to focus on next week, but we also have to remember Myanmar has an election five days later.
Javier E

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...629369

politics history social media technology psychology bias fragmentation

shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.
  • Social media has weakened all three.
  • gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.
  • ...118 more annotations...
  • the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.
  • Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom
  • That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers.
  • “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.
  • Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well.
  • Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.
  • By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous”
  • If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
  • This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment,
  • As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.
  • It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution.
  • The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.”
  • The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.
  • The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare.
  • a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality.
  • Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”
  • Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.
  • It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust.
  • a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions.
  • when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side
  • The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).
  • The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
  • When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children.
  • Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country
  • The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further.
  • young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.
  • former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached.
  • he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. I
  • The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile
  • Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.
  • I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right.
  • Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.
  • fter Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.
  • Politics After Babel
  • “Politics is the art of the possible,” the German statesman Otto von Bismarck said in 1867. In a post-Babel democracy, not much may be possible.
  • The ideological distance between the two parties began increasing faster in the 1990s. Fox News and the 1994 “Republican Revolution” converted the GOP into a more combative party.
  • So cross-party relationships were already strained before 2009. But the enhanced virality of social media thereafter made it more hazardous to be seen fraternizing with the enemy or even failing to attack the enemy with sufficient vigor.
  • What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet
  • from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.
  • “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population.
  • the warped “accountability” of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways.
  • First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens.
  • a small subset of people on social-media platforms are highly concerned with gaining status and are willing to use aggression to do so.
  • Across eight studies, Bor and Petersen found that being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims. Even a small number of jerks were able to dominate discussion forums,
  • Additional research finds that women and Black people are harassed disproportionately, so the digital public square is less welcoming to their voices.
  • Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority.
  • The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors.
  • Social media has given voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds
  • The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.
  • These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society.
  • they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes.
  • likely a result of thought-policing on social media:
  • political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team.
  • Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for vigilantes.
  • Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide
  • we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.
  • Since the tower fell, debates of all kinds have grown more and more confused. The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs
  • search engines were supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theorie
  • The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument.
  • In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals
  • English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury.
  • Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking.
  • Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence.
  • Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history
  • But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.”
  • This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted
  • it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight
  • Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.
  • The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values.
  • The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors.
  • they are psychologically different from the larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.
  • The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence.”
  • Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives
  • The wave of threats delivered to dissenting Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality.
  • The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress.
  • The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win.
  • The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions, dissent has been stifled:
  • Liberals in the late 20th century shared a belief that the sociologist Christian Smith called the “liberal progress” narrative, in which America used to be horrifically unjust and repressive, but, thanks to the struggles of activists and heroes, has made (and continues to make) progress toward realizing the noble promise of its founding.
  • It is also the view of the “traditional liberals” in the “Hidden Tribes” study (11 percent of the population), who have strong humanitarian values, are older than average, and are largely the people leading America’s cultural and intellectual institutions.
  • when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders.
  • Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.
  • The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group.
  • The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.
  • anyone on Twitter had already seen dozens of examples teaching the basic lesson: Don’t question your own side’s beliefs, policies, or actions. And when traditional liberals go silent, as so many did in the summer of 2020, the progressive activists’ more radical narrative takes over as the governing narrative of an organization.
  • This is why so many epistemic institutions seemed to “go woke” in rapid succession that year and the next, beginning with a wave of controversies and resignations at The New York Times and other newspapers, and continuing on to social-justice pronouncements by groups of doctors and medical associations
  • The problem is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.
  • In a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry.
  • artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence.
  • Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)
  • American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too.
  • In the 20th century, America’s shared identity as the country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong force that helped keep the culture and the polity together.
  • In the 21st century, America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.
  • What changes are needed?
  • I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era.
  • We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.
  • Harden Democratic Institutions
  • we must reform key institutions so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation, and violence increase far above those we have today.
  • Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district.
  • One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting
  • A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections
  • These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way.
  • Reform Social Media
  • Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive.
  • it is within our power to reduce social media’s ability to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reforms should limit the platforms’ amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.”
  • the main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before
  • Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.
  • One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.
  • Prepare the Next Generation
  • Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults
  • Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people
  • Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.
  • The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty.
  • The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.
  • et them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision
  • while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms.
  • What would it be like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? We know. It is a time of confusion and loss. But it is also a time to reflect, listen, and build.
  • In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.
  • when we look away from our dysfunctional federal government, disconnect from social media, and talk with our neighbors directly, things seem more hopeful. Most Americans in the More in Common report are members of the “exhausted majority,” which is tired of the fighting and is willing to listen to the other side and compromise. Most Americans now see that social media is having a negative impact on the country, and are becoming more aware of its damaging effects on children.
Javier E

Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ngela-merkel-donald-trump.html

obama fake news social media

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • “Because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and its packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television,” Mr. Obama said. “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made,
  • Bogus news stories appearing online and on social media appear to have had a greater reach in the final months of the campaign than articles by authoritative, mainstream news outlets, according to an analysis of Facebook activity by BuzzFeed
  • In the three months before Election Day, the most popular stories produced by hoax sites and “hyperpartisan blogs” generated more engagement — likes, shares and comments — on Facebook than the most popular articles by major news websites, the analysis found.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Among the 20 most popular fake election stories identified by BuzzFeed, all but three favored Mr. Trump or denigrated Hillary Clinton.
  • “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, and particularly in an age of social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites and off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.”
Javier E

Beyond Billboards - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...beyond-billboards.html

Christianity Christmas myth sin

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Sunday, December 12, 2010Sunday, December 12, 2010 Go Follow the Atlantic » atlanticPrintlayoutnavigation()Politics Presented ByBack to the Gold Standard? Joshua GreenSenate Dems Lose Vote on 'Don't Ask' RepealMegan Scully & Dan FriedmanA Primary Challenge to Obama? Marc Ambinder Business Presented byif (typeof window.dartOrd == 'undefined') {window.dartOrd = ('000000000' + Math.ceil(Math.random()*1000000000).toString()).slice(-9);}jsProperties = 'TheAtlanticOnline/channel_business;pos=navlogo;sz=88x31,215x64;tile=1';document.write('');if( $(".adNavlogo").html().search("grey.gif") != -1 ){$(".adNavlogo").hide();}Will the Economy Get Jobs for Christmas?Daniel Indiviglio27 Key Facts About US ExportsDerek ThompsonThe Last StimulusDerek Thompson Culture Presented ByThe 10 Biggest Sports Stories of 2010Eleanor Barkhorn and Kevin Fallon al
  • at the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.
Javier E

Big Money Wins Again in a Romp - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oney-wins-again-in-a-romp.html

rich campaign donations corruption politics free speech financing

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Two days after the midterm elections, I met up with a man named Ira Glasser, the former longtime head of the American Civil Liberties Union.
  • Glasser is a First Amendment absolutist. And to him, that means that he supports the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling on Citizens United because he believes virtually all campaign finance laws violate the First Amendment.
  • But what about what happens after the election? It is not the spending itself that is the problem, but rather the purpose of that spending.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • “So money equals speech?” I asked. No, he said. “But nobody speaks very effectively without money. If you limit how much you spend on speech, you are also limiting speech.”
  • Penniman makes a distinction between “ideological givers” — donors like the Koch brothers, motivated by the chance to get like-minded people elected — and “transactional givers,” those who donate because they expect something concrete in return. “These are folks who give just as generously to both sides of the aisle.”
  • It can be subtle, this influence. “Maybe it’s the amendment that does not get introduced in committee because the congressman knows that it is not in sync with the desires of his money patrons,”
  • it can be not so subtle, too. “On any given Wednesday night in Washington,” says Nick Penniman, the executive director of Issue One, which is dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics, “you’ll have a member of, say, the finance committee, standing in the board room of a lobbyist’s office, surrounded by bank lobbyists. At some point, someone will hand a staffer an envelope with the checks in it, and the congressman will have raised $100,000 in 45 minutes. And they know exactly who was responsible for putting it together, and whose phone calls therefore need to be returned.”
  • Big contributors want something for their money. At its most benign, they want access, the ability to have their side heard whenever there is the possibility that legislation might affect their industry. Far less benignly, they want more — they want to know that their bidding will be done.
  • “Big money wins regardless of which party wins the election.”
  • There are two other reasons big money is corrosive to our politics.
  • One is that the need to raise money has become close to all-consuming.
  • “It’s a never-ending hustle. You get elected to this august body to fix problems, and for the privilege, you find yourself on the phone in a cubicle, dialing for dollars.”
  • the constant need to raise money means that “you don’t have the time for the kind of personal relationships that so many of us built up over time.” When people don’t know each other, it is a lot easier to think the worst of them. Polarization is the result.
  • Finally, there is the effect of big money on the rest of us. The public, Sarbanes believes, knows full well the insidious influence of money in politics. “The rational voter will say to himself, why should I bother voting if the person I’m voting for is a captive of special interests,
  • how does Ira Glasser react to these tales of corruption? He doesn’t deny them. “Of course there is corruption,” he says. “Of course there is undue influence of money.” But he doesn’t believe that those problems are as great as they are made out to be, or that they trump his First Amendment concerns. “The question is whether the remedy does more harm than good and violates the constitution,”
1 - 20 of 359 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page