Just thought I'd share a tidbit that I haven't been able to elsewhere. I work for a large market research firm that does polls for a large news network. On Sunday, we ran a poll for them that put Trump at 8 points ahead. They decided against publishing it.
That interesting. I run a silly little website website that invited people to vote against one of the two candidates [1]. I watched our analytics like a hawk during the couple of weeks before the elections in order to adjust messaging, content and ads.
This, of course, wasn't scientific at all except for the fact that we were running ads to attract both sides of the discussion equally. They were geographically limited to the US. About a week before the elections the trend was unmistakable. The support for Trump in the form of CTR, engagement and votes to the hundreds of different ads out there told a story.
We actually tried to get this story out and attempted to publish a press release. It was rejected by all of the top press release agencies we used for other business. Not one of them wanted to publish that things were not looking good from Clinton, even from a silly little entertainment site.
To confirm the bias a few days later we issued a press release indicating that Clinton was catching-up and Trump was predicted to lose. Everyone published the release.
We can't have the media operate with such bias in this country. Freedom of the press is important, but when the press become political activists we should all yell foul and reign them in. The first thing totalitarian regimes do is take control of the press. We can't have a press that is so far to the left that they won't report the truth, or worst, distort it.
I know this is just one data point. There are plenty more from other sources. The bias and manipulation are very real.
We can't have the media operate with such bias in this country. Freedom of the press is important, but when the press become political activists we should all yell foul and reign them in. The first thing totalitarian regimes do is take control of the press. We can't have a press that is so far to the left that they won't report the truth, or worst, distort it.
You say we "can't", but we demonstrably do have such a press. And you're 100% correct to discern the totalitarian nature of it.
Which is why alternative sources have become so important, and as more people's "Pravda breakers" trip (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921328) the less important this old press becomes. Look no further than the former "Newspaper of Record", it's post-election front page, it's crashing revenue, and why I call it "Carlos Slim's personal blog".
Historically it started with Reagan's zapping of the "'Fairness' Doctrine", which allowed right of center talk radio to become a thing, which I'm sure helped prime things for rise of the Internet. Drudge's 1998 reporting of a story spiked by Newsweek (sold in 2010 for a dollar and assumption of its liabilities) clearly marked this was a decisive change ... and yet our "press", MSM, this whole old establishment, seems determined to stay the course.
Which, just citing the two financial bits above, looks like a path to oblivion (although many of us are predicting they'll get direct government support soon enough, but that won't get them readers), and therefore self-correcting in, say, the medium term. So I'm not quite so alarmed, as long as the Internet stays free of censorship at the IP and maybe DNS levels.
> when the press become political activists we should all yell foul and reign them in. The first thing totalitarian regimes do is take control of the press.
We should take control of the press, like totalitarian regimes!
(Sorry for the snark, but there really is a big contradiction here which both sides are struggling with. The American press aren't especially left-wing, they're just tremendously unreliable - story template first, facts second.)
Thank you for sharing. From my two months of non-professional research, it looked like Trump was going to win by a big margin. The major media outlets were looking outright deceptive from my perspective.
pcunite - we've discussed in another thread, but the election was actually quite close. HRC had more of the popular vote, and a 1% shift from Trump to Clinton would have resulted in her victory.
The major media outlets were looking outright deceptive from my perspective.
I had some CNBC shows saved on my Tivo and I recently went back to look at what they were saying. Here's an extreme example of the deception. Just the day before the election CNBC was showing states such as Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota as "leaning" GOP, not "likely" GOP. But here are the results for those states:
Montana Trump 57% Clinton 36%
North Dakota Trump 64% Clinton 28%
South Dakota Trump 61% Clinton 32%
From this one could easily conclude that the mainstream media deliberately chose to deceive about the expected outcome in those states. Why? Perhaps to not show as much dark red on the national map?
Yes there were true battlegrounds or toss-ups. E.g. Florida only went for Trump by about 1.3%. But there were more than 2x as many Trump voters than Clinton voters in North Dakota. It was a bald-faced brazen lie to call that "leaning".
The correct way to present polls is with a sampling of many different polls, like Real Clear Politics or 538. Yes, all the polls were off across the board, but individual polls have a higher likelihood of being wrong than a bunch of polls combined.
Most of our other polls were off as well, but in Clinton's favor, so do we not publish those either? At the time, there was no way to know what was correct, so shouldn't sharing the information be more important than anything else?
However, unless you are already very knowledgeable in these subjects, it will take longer than 10 hours to understand them. Very much worth the read though.
And with good reason: polls measure popular vote, not electoral vote, and Trump most certainly did not win the popular vote by 8 points. He didn't even come close to that margin.
Keep in mind that there is a difference between a poll and a model. Models aggregate many polls in ways which attempt to predict the Electoral College tally. This includes polls specific to individual states. In this election even state level polls were inaccurate which lead to model predictions being off.
I don't understand how thick headed the mainstream media (MSM) seems to be in not getting it. This "upset" win of Trump (upset in the sense that it didn't play by the MSM's wishes) was not an isolated incident - it's happened in India (2014), it happened in UK (Brexit), and it has been repeated in the US.
The fundamental driver for all three instances has been the removal of all filters on social media. The problem was that for too long the MSM used their power to filter content to its readers/viewers, and the filter was tuned by a group that wanted to script reality in a form that they wished to see come to fruition, even if their stand was hypocritical.
So for example, you'd see a huge hue and cry in the MSM about how freedom of expression was being harmed because a right wing outfit threatened someone for speaking out against a majority religion, and yet, when someone spoke out against Islam, and Islamic groups placed a bounty on his head, the same MSM would just go silent. It is this blatant hypocrisy that finally got them.
And now, with social media, for the first time people have access to unfiltered news and can form their own opinions. And for better or worse, the hypocrisy of the MSM is glaringly obvious for people who have access to multiple viewpoints on an incident - not just a filtered viewpoint. With the hypocrisy bare, it's basically been a revolt against the established media.
And unless the established media takes it upon themselves to be more honest in whatever stand they take, this is going to repeat, because, people aren't fools you know.
Old media model: a couple thousand Harvard graduates produce and filter the content for billions of people (English speaking world) by monopoly control on the 2-3 television channels, 4-5 major newspapers/zines.
New media model: a media consumer can read the opinions and thoughts of 1000s of other people across the globe, and participate in the formulation of their own opinions, and receive feedback from others.
The one-to-many top-down elitist control of opinion formation and transfer is dead. For better or for worse. Probably better. Especially when it appears to be the case that the main opinion media elitists care about is that people acknowledge them as elite..
The only criticism of the new media model I've seen is the filter bubble, but I feel that is overblown.
The real filter bubble is not one that's imposed by Facebook, but one that's imposed by an individual.
That is, people join subreddits or Tumblr groups and they filter out opposing views. Then they approach the "center" of that group, which itself is way outside mainstream.
Eventually, they self-impose a sort of filter that limits the access to moderating opinions.
With the "old model" (leaving aside op-eds), I at least have some assurance that due-diligence is being done in terms of research, fact checking and verification of sources. The "old model" has journalists in the field, on the front lines reporting the facts.
With the "new model", I have zero assurance that due-diligence has been done. The burden of analysis and research is squarely on my shoulders. A fact is no longer a fact in that I can find any blog to support whatever position I wish to take. The blurring of opinion with news is "infotainment". The filter bubble reinforces itself.
Unfortunately, unfiltered also means more "undistilled".
The flipside of removal of filters of news on social media, is that we get a lot more low quality news based on unchecked facts. It is bad enough that the established media posts "breaking news" as fast as possible without taking the time to thoroughly consider the facts or give us a complete and rounded story.
Everything is becoming "headline news". We get more and more during the day, and we don't have the same time to digest what we get, so we just look at the headlines, skip the reports we don't like, and skim the few that look interesting -- The echo chamber.
We still need high quality sources that are trustworthy and able to filter out some of the "noise", simplify the stories to something we can digest without loosing details, and we also need to be exposed to news we don't like.
News on social media is sensationlist and usually none of those things.
In a world of more noise, more echo, fewer facts, and less details, we decide more based on gut feelings.
I think some of Trump's result could be attributed to the fact that, he spoke more to the heart of people than Hillary did.
E.g. the coal miners who voted for Trump because he promised them their jobs back. At least I think, it will difficult to return coal to its former "glory" with the current energy landscape (e.g. cheap and plenty oil as well as cheaper alternatives), so I am doubtful that will happen.
The whole idea of making America great again, returning jobs, and repealing trade agreements and Obama Care, speaks primarily to the heart of the people. We all love the good old times -- Especially, when we feel down and out of luck and life is difficult.
I think you're underestimating the intelligence of people. We like to think that we're much better than the average Joe at separating the wheat from the chaff, but the truth is that the average Joe just isn't so bad at it either - or at least, isn't much worse than an editor sitting in his echo chamber.
If I look at my twitter feed now, for example, I have a bunch of tweets criticizing a new decision of the government to withdraw high-denomination currencies (I'm from India), and for every such tweet there are others that are calling out the fallacies of the argument put forth. And vice versa.
Gives me all the viewpoints I need to form an opinion.
E.g. the coal miners who voted for Trump because he promised them their jobs back. At least I think, it will difficult to return coal to its former "glory" with the current energy landscape (e.g. cheap and plenty oil as well as cheaper alternatives), so I am doubtful that will happen.
It can at least partially happen. The Democrats have waged absolute total war on the coal industry, something Hillary explicitly confirmed during the campaign, and you don't have to dial that back much to have some good effects, the biggest issue will be the power plants that have converted to natural gas and can't easily go back (and, boy, was that a bad national decision, making us much more fragile, even if coal is truly nasty stuff).
>> Huffington Post told its readers Clinton had a 98 percent chance of being elected;
>> build a better environment for news
I agree. They can start by not telling me what to think. Focus on reporting. I got so sick of the media putting spin on what Hillary thinks (they know what she thinks?) or what someone else was saying about Donald trump (without vetting) from 30 years ago and on and on.
I have stopped believing them. The news agencies are opinion shows as far as I'm concerned. They are propaganda, bought and paid for by interests that are not American.
I take this post as an example of the media looking for anyone to blame, except themselves. The closest that the post comes to a mea culpa is this:
> And of those who [sought information in journalism], not enough of them trusted it to inform their political decisions.
Of course they didn't. We know, for instance, that media after the Gulf War will not allow pictures that show war as anything but spotless. We know that, for every single topic, they'll present a stupid counterpoint and claim that a 50/50 balance is needed, even if the counterbalance is nonsense. They barely call people out on their (obvious, documented) lies. And don't get me started on sponsored content.
I think people turned to Facebook news because, ultimately, they trust their friends and relatives more than the media. And why shouldn't they? The media has done everything in their power to shape public discourse as they see fit, and now they are surprised that people don't trust them anymore.
I can't really see Facebook censoring, fact-checking, or otherwise adjusting their algorithms to expose people to opposing views in any significant way. They're the McDonalds of the internet. Their entire business model depends on satisfying the addictive cravings of their users. It would be like McDonalds discontinuing fries and replacing them with kale and tofu bites.
The main bubble that burst was that of the people who thought trump was a joke, no?
Are fed up people really the medias failure? Bernie Sanders also had surprising support for similar reasons to Trump: they both where going against the system.
Just for some discussion: maybe the classic media finally lost control and people regained some freedom of choice? Every big media house was against trump and he still won.
And let's not forget that a lot of people really had to jump their shadow to vote for Hillary as the lesser evil.
I know that getting Mark Zuckerberg to care about the problem is absolutely key to the health of our information ecosystem.
Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying it's "crazy" to think that fake news on FB could have influenced the election. OP says that a fake news story about the Pope endorsing Trump got 868,000 shares on FB. Something doesn't add up here.
Zuckerburg is a lying sack of shit. Or (here's the part were I hedge so dang doesn't scold me for not giving infinite second chances) Zuckerberg is a boob that forgot his own company published an scholarly study about their ability to manipulate people through small chances in what they're shown.
People like to think they can ignore the influence of things like advertising, propaganda and promotional freebies. But time and time again the data shows it works, just more subtly that dropping everything and running to the store for a Pepsi. Social influence of political opinion isn't hugely different.
Perhaps Zuckerburg means it's crazy that anyone let anything posted on facebook influence them. But that idea is interchangeable with the idea it's crazy people use facebook at all. Everyone at facebook is working to make a product that influences people, whether they're immediately cognizant of it or not.
I expect fake and misleading anti-Trump stories saw similar numbers; I've certainly been seeing quite a lot them shared widely on Twitter. (The photoshopped fake of Trump's parents in KKK uniforms got a cool quarter of a million retweets, for example, which is astounding for Twitter.) So it probably contributed to the polarized and hostile nature of the election, but there's no particular reason to assume it swung the results one way or the other.
868,000 is less than 1/60, and this assumes everyone who shared it believed it. Some may have realized it was false, and shared for the lulz. Also, it assumes that all of those people actually voted.
Heh, you've got a point, but simple brand recognition, or even making me aware of a product could be sufficient (I don't exactly buy into The Hidden Persuaders thesis, read about half of it back in the '70s and ... wasn't persuaded ^_^).
How many "X company is shutting down" HN items have you seen where you've never heard of the company in the first place?
I the forces that drove this election's media failure centre almost entirely around the problems with polling data, not a inherent problem with journalism.
The journalists were working with the best data that they had available. If a journalist is told that there is only a small chance of a candidate being elected, it is not surprising that they don't necessarily take his chances seriously.
Credit to 538 though, for putting Clinton's chances sub-70% in the final week (returning to to 70% on the final day) and for repeatedly warning of the lack of certainty given the lack of good quality polls.
I disagree. The problem was that all journalists (Fox News included) used the polling as an excuse to not actually get out and do journalism. Polls should have been but one input. Instead, because most polls said what all of them wanted to believe, the effects of anchoring and confirmation biases were amplified. Anything to the contrary was dismissed as nonsense.
Readit News
This, of course, wasn't scientific at all except for the fact that we were running ads to attract both sides of the discussion equally. They were geographically limited to the US. About a week before the elections the trend was unmistakable. The support for Trump in the form of CTR, engagement and votes to the hundreds of different ads out there told a story.
We actually tried to get this story out and attempted to publish a press release. It was rejected by all of the top press release agencies we used for other business. Not one of them wanted to publish that things were not looking good from Clinton, even from a silly little entertainment site.
To confirm the bias a few days later we issued a press release indicating that Clinton was catching-up and Trump was predicted to lose. Everyone published the release.
We can't have the media operate with such bias in this country. Freedom of the press is important, but when the press become political activists we should all yell foul and reign them in. The first thing totalitarian regimes do is take control of the press. We can't have a press that is so far to the left that they won't report the truth, or worst, distort it.
I know this is just one data point. There are plenty more from other sources. The bias and manipulation are very real.
[1] http://youarefired.com/
You say we "can't", but we demonstrably do have such a press. And you're 100% correct to discern the totalitarian nature of it.
Which is why alternative sources have become so important, and as more people's "Pravda breakers" trip (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921328) the less important this old press becomes. Look no further than the former "Newspaper of Record", it's post-election front page, it's crashing revenue, and why I call it "Carlos Slim's personal blog".
Historically it started with Reagan's zapping of the "'Fairness' Doctrine", which allowed right of center talk radio to become a thing, which I'm sure helped prime things for rise of the Internet. Drudge's 1998 reporting of a story spiked by Newsweek (sold in 2010 for a dollar and assumption of its liabilities) clearly marked this was a decisive change ... and yet our "press", MSM, this whole old establishment, seems determined to stay the course.
Which, just citing the two financial bits above, looks like a path to oblivion (although many of us are predicting they'll get direct government support soon enough, but that won't get them readers), and therefore self-correcting in, say, the medium term. So I'm not quite so alarmed, as long as the Internet stays free of censorship at the IP and maybe DNS levels.
We should take control of the press, like totalitarian regimes!
(Sorry for the snark, but there really is a big contradiction here which both sides are struggling with. The American press aren't especially left-wing, they're just tremendously unreliable - story template first, facts second.)
Here's an excellent analysis from five-thirty-eight: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-perc...
The vote was almost dead even. If you though Trump was going to win big then you were just as wrong as the places that predicted a big Clinton win.
I had some CNBC shows saved on my Tivo and I recently went back to look at what they were saying. Here's an extreme example of the deception. Just the day before the election CNBC was showing states such as Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota as "leaning" GOP, not "likely" GOP. But here are the results for those states:
From this one could easily conclude that the mainstream media deliberately chose to deceive about the expected outcome in those states. Why? Perhaps to not show as much dark red on the national map?Yes there were true battlegrounds or toss-ups. E.g. Florida only went for Trump by about 1.3%. But there were more than 2x as many Trump voters than Clinton voters in North Dakota. It was a bald-faced brazen lie to call that "leaning".
* For designing psychology experiments: https://smile.amazon.com/Conducting-Research-Psychology-Meas...
* For Bayesian modeling and inference: https://smile.amazon.com/Bayesian-Analysis-Chapman-Statistic...
However, unless you are already very knowledgeable in these subjects, it will take longer than 10 hours to understand them. Very much worth the read though.
The point of polls is to predict who's going to win.
It's not that hard to take into account Electoral College anyways.
The fundamental driver for all three instances has been the removal of all filters on social media. The problem was that for too long the MSM used their power to filter content to its readers/viewers, and the filter was tuned by a group that wanted to script reality in a form that they wished to see come to fruition, even if their stand was hypocritical.
So for example, you'd see a huge hue and cry in the MSM about how freedom of expression was being harmed because a right wing outfit threatened someone for speaking out against a majority religion, and yet, when someone spoke out against Islam, and Islamic groups placed a bounty on his head, the same MSM would just go silent. It is this blatant hypocrisy that finally got them.
And now, with social media, for the first time people have access to unfiltered news and can form their own opinions. And for better or worse, the hypocrisy of the MSM is glaringly obvious for people who have access to multiple viewpoints on an incident - not just a filtered viewpoint. With the hypocrisy bare, it's basically been a revolt against the established media.
And unless the established media takes it upon themselves to be more honest in whatever stand they take, this is going to repeat, because, people aren't fools you know.
Old media model: a couple thousand Harvard graduates produce and filter the content for billions of people (English speaking world) by monopoly control on the 2-3 television channels, 4-5 major newspapers/zines.
New media model: a media consumer can read the opinions and thoughts of 1000s of other people across the globe, and participate in the formulation of their own opinions, and receive feedback from others.
The one-to-many top-down elitist control of opinion formation and transfer is dead. For better or for worse. Probably better. Especially when it appears to be the case that the main opinion media elitists care about is that people acknowledge them as elite..
The only criticism of the new media model I've seen is the filter bubble, but I feel that is overblown.
That is, people join subreddits or Tumblr groups and they filter out opposing views. Then they approach the "center" of that group, which itself is way outside mainstream.
Eventually, they self-impose a sort of filter that limits the access to moderating opinions.
Each viewpoint is "correct" from the authors viewpoint, knowledge, and information. Doesn't mean that it's closer to the truth in the wider world.
With the "new model", I have zero assurance that due-diligence has been done. The burden of analysis and research is squarely on my shoulders. A fact is no longer a fact in that I can find any blog to support whatever position I wish to take. The blurring of opinion with news is "infotainment". The filter bubble reinforces itself.
The flipside of removal of filters of news on social media, is that we get a lot more low quality news based on unchecked facts. It is bad enough that the established media posts "breaking news" as fast as possible without taking the time to thoroughly consider the facts or give us a complete and rounded story.
Everything is becoming "headline news". We get more and more during the day, and we don't have the same time to digest what we get, so we just look at the headlines, skip the reports we don't like, and skim the few that look interesting -- The echo chamber.
We still need high quality sources that are trustworthy and able to filter out some of the "noise", simplify the stories to something we can digest without loosing details, and we also need to be exposed to news we don't like.
News on social media is sensationlist and usually none of those things.
In a world of more noise, more echo, fewer facts, and less details, we decide more based on gut feelings.
I think some of Trump's result could be attributed to the fact that, he spoke more to the heart of people than Hillary did.
E.g. the coal miners who voted for Trump because he promised them their jobs back. At least I think, it will difficult to return coal to its former "glory" with the current energy landscape (e.g. cheap and plenty oil as well as cheaper alternatives), so I am doubtful that will happen.
The whole idea of making America great again, returning jobs, and repealing trade agreements and Obama Care, speaks primarily to the heart of the people. We all love the good old times -- Especially, when we feel down and out of luck and life is difficult.
If I look at my twitter feed now, for example, I have a bunch of tweets criticizing a new decision of the government to withdraw high-denomination currencies (I'm from India), and for every such tweet there are others that are calling out the fallacies of the argument put forth. And vice versa.
Gives me all the viewpoints I need to form an opinion.
It can at least partially happen. The Democrats have waged absolute total war on the coal industry, something Hillary explicitly confirmed during the campaign, and you don't have to dial that back much to have some good effects, the biggest issue will be the power plants that have converted to natural gas and can't easily go back (and, boy, was that a bad national decision, making us much more fragile, even if coal is truly nasty stuff).
>> build a better environment for news
I agree. They can start by not telling me what to think. Focus on reporting. I got so sick of the media putting spin on what Hillary thinks (they know what she thinks?) or what someone else was saying about Donald trump (without vetting) from 30 years ago and on and on.
I have stopped believing them. The news agencies are opinion shows as far as I'm concerned. They are propaganda, bought and paid for by interests that are not American.
> And of those who [sought information in journalism], not enough of them trusted it to inform their political decisions.
Of course they didn't. We know, for instance, that media after the Gulf War will not allow pictures that show war as anything but spotless. We know that, for every single topic, they'll present a stupid counterpoint and claim that a 50/50 balance is needed, even if the counterbalance is nonsense. They barely call people out on their (obvious, documented) lies. And don't get me started on sponsored content.
I think people turned to Facebook news because, ultimately, they trust their friends and relatives more than the media. And why shouldn't they? The media has done everything in their power to shape public discourse as they see fit, and now they are surprised that people don't trust them anymore.
Spend some of that money to support a newsroom.
Are fed up people really the medias failure? Bernie Sanders also had surprising support for similar reasons to Trump: they both where going against the system.
Just for some discussion: maybe the classic media finally lost control and people regained some freedom of choice? Every big media house was against trump and he still won.
And let's not forget that a lot of people really had to jump their shadow to vote for Hillary as the lesser evil.
Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying it's "crazy" to think that fake news on FB could have influenced the election. OP says that a fake news story about the Pope endorsing Trump got 868,000 shares on FB. Something doesn't add up here.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/10/technology/facebook-mark-zuc...
Zuckerburg is a lying sack of shit. Or (here's the part were I hedge so dang doesn't scold me for not giving infinite second chances) Zuckerberg is a boob that forgot his own company published an scholarly study about their ability to manipulate people through small chances in what they're shown.
People like to think they can ignore the influence of things like advertising, propaganda and promotional freebies. But time and time again the data shows it works, just more subtly that dropping everything and running to the store for a Pepsi. Social influence of political opinion isn't hugely different.
Perhaps Zuckerburg means it's crazy that anyone let anything posted on facebook influence them. But that idea is interchangeable with the idea it's crazy people use facebook at all. Everyone at facebook is working to make a product that influences people, whether they're immediately cognizant of it or not.
~60,000,000 people voted for each side.
868,000 is less than 1/60, and this assumes everyone who shared it believed it. Some may have realized it was false, and shared for the lulz. Also, it assumes that all of those people actually voted.
How many "X company is shutting down" HN items have you seen where you've never heard of the company in the first place?
The journalists were working with the best data that they had available. If a journalist is told that there is only a small chance of a candidate being elected, it is not surprising that they don't necessarily take his chances seriously.
Credit to 538 though, for putting Clinton's chances sub-70% in the final week (returning to to 70% on the final day) and for repeatedly warning of the lack of certainty given the lack of good quality polls.