Trump is president-elect. But he’s still a troll. So why do we fall for it?

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trump-pence_tweet

Way back in July, Dave Winer wrote an astute blog post that was a model of wisdom and common sense in relation to Trump. In it he pointed out that Trump is what we Internet folks call a troll. And we know how to deal with trolls:

The simple fix

It’s so important a lesson, learned so many times by so many people, through so much pain, that it has been codified into a mantra, so we never forget.

  1. Don’t feed the troll.
  2. Don’t feed the troll.
  3. Don’t feed the troll.
  4. Don’t feed the troll.
  5. Don’t feed the troll.

Etc. Yet we keep feeding the troll.

Why?

Why indeed? Last night, the cast of the Broadway musical Hamilton gave Vice President-elect Pence a bit of a lecture. Right on cue, Trump then tweeted:

“The Theater must always be a safe and special place. The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!”

You can imagine the result. Liberal apoplexy on social media. Which leads the inimitable Jack Shafer to write:

Meanwhile, in the villainous golden lair he maintains in Trump Tower, Baby Donald laughed his best Dr. Evil laugh. Got ‘em again, he thought. Yesterday’s settlement of the Trump University lawsuit is the real news, but my Twitter incitement will dominate all else for at least 12 hours as people tweet, “How could he?”, “Oh, now he’s for safe spaces?” and “Don’t tell artists what to say or do!”

Spot on. And Trump’s opponents fell for it hook, line and sinker. As Shafer notes,

Have none of them been paying attention to Trump’s Twitter strategy for the past 17 months? For anybody who has read a half-dozen of Trump’s tweets, the pattern is obvious. He compiles these tweets precisely in order to elicit strident protest. It doesn’t matter to Trump that the cast of Hamilton was polite and respectful to Pence. It doesn’t matter that being rude to office holders is an inalienable right—hell, a responsibility!—of all Americans. To Trump’s followers the content of any one of his rebukes matters less than whom it’s directed at — New York liberals and their fellow travelers in this instance.

What’s been truly amazing about Trump’s Twitter strategy is how spectacularly successful it’s been. All through the campaign, while the rest of the world was asleep he unfailingly composed a tweet that ensured that he would lead the following morning’s news. And all that people could say was that a person who tweeted in the middle of the night must be off his head. Au contraire. Trump used Twitter as a way of keeping mainstream TV news on the hook.

And he’s still doing it.

So back to Dave Winer’s advice: stop feeding the troll. Let him tweet into the void. And focus instead on his plan to install his family in the Presidential Palace that we used to call the White House and the diehard reactionaries he’s installing in charge of the national security state.

How did we get here?

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Gary Wills has a sobering piece in the New York Review of Books. After looking at some pre-Trump demagogues — Father Charles Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace — he observes that Lleaders are made by followers. So…

The real question should be: what did the followers want that they could supply? Demagogues can touch exposed nerves, but some perceived crisis has to expose the nerves in the first place. Each of these men (only men) rode a turgid wave of turmoil caused by some menacing development. The Depression was the crisis Coughlin claimed to meet, by blaming it on the Jews. The cold war created the Commie scare that gave McCarthy his hunting license. The civil rights movement made Wallace a grubby improbable knight of the Old South. What is the crisis that created that parasite on the Republican Party called Trump?

What do his followers want to be saved from, even by a not-very-palatable savior? Two crises have, with some justification, been listed. First there is the shock some whites feel at having a black man in the Oval Office treated as superior to them. A second crisis is the growing income inequality, letting whatever money is still being made float inevitably up to those who are already rich. These anxieties do, undoubtedly, gnaw at Trump’s followers. But I think a deeper crisis underlies them both, not shouldering them aside but pitching in to make them both more pervasive and more intense.

This is the shuddering distrust of every kind of authority—a contempt for the whole political system, its “establishment,” the Congress, its institutions (like the Fed), its “mainstream” media, the international arrangements it has made (not only the trade deals but the treaty obligations under NATO and other defense agreements). This is a staggering injection of bile into the public discourse. It does not answer, or even address, the question: what kind of order can be maintained in a society that does not recognize the legitimacy of any offices?

What has caused this bitter disillusion? It is the burrowing and undermining infection of the Iraq war—the longest in our history, one that keeps upsetting order abroad and at home. The war’s many costs—not just in lives and money but in psychic and political damage—remain only half-visible in America, as hidden as the returning coffins that could not be photographed for years…

All true. But I suspect that for many of the folks who voted for Trump, the Iraq war was the last thing on their minds.

Facebook’s (shirked) editorial responsibilities – contd.

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The story continues. This from today’s Guardian:

The scrutiny over Facebook’s treatment of editorial content has been intensifying for months, reflecting the site’s unrivaled power and influence in distributing news alongside everything else its users share on the site.

Fake or misleading news spreads like wildfire on Facebook because of confirmation bias, a quirk in human psychology that makes us more likely to accept information that conforms to our existing world views. The conspiracy theories are also amplified by a network of highly partisan media outlets with questionable editorial policies, including a website called the Denver Guardian peddling stories about Clinton murdering people and a cluster of pro-Trump sites founded by teenagers in Veles, Macedonia, motivated only by the advertising dollars they can accrue if enough people click on their links.

The Pew Research Center found that 62% of Americans get all or some of their news from social media, of which Facebook accounts for the lion’s share. Yet an analysis by BuzzFeed found that 38% of posts shared on Facebook by three rightwing politics sites included “false or misleading information”, while three large leftwing pages did so 19% of the time.

LATER This from Buzzfeed:

“If someone is right-wing, and all their friends are right-wing, and that is the news they share on Facebook, then that is the bubble they have created for themselves and that is their right,” said the longtime Facebook engineer. “But to highlight fake news articles in the [news] feed, to promote them so they get millions of shares by people who think they are real, that’s not something we should allow to happen. Facebook is getting played by people using us to spread their bullshit.”

Spot on. That’s the key to it.

Zuckerberg, truth and ‘meaningfulness’

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Wow! The controversy about fake news on Facebook during the election has finally got to the Boss. Mark Zuckerberg wrote a long status update (aka blog post) on the subject. Here’s a sample:

Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.

That said, we don’t want any hoaxes on Facebook. Our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news. We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here. We have made progress, and we will continue to work on this to improve further.

This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully though. Identifying the “truth” is complicated. While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted. An even greater volume of stories express an opinion that many will disagree with and flag as incorrect even when factual. I am confident we can find ways for our community to tell us what content is most meaningful, but I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.

Well, he’s right about the elusiveness of ‘the truth’. But ‘meaningful’ ain’t it. Zuckerberg is squirming on the hook of editorial responsibility — which he desperately doesn’t want to have.

Election 2016 highlights journalistic failure

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Jeff Jarvis has a thoughtful essay on Medium about the failures of journalism in the campaign. Worth reading in full. This para caught my eye, though:

The idea of “balance” in any one media outlet has turned out to be as deceiving and bankrupt as the idea of “objectivity” — indeed, worse, for false balance is used to justify friction and fighting on the air and the damaging, uninformative scourge of the “surrogate” in this election. After helping to manufacture the Trump phenomenon, CNN actually believes hiring Corey Lewandowski provides balance. That’s not about informing the public. That’s not about journalism. That’s about producing entertainment.

Clinton claims that FBI Director lost her the election

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Interesting article in the New York Times about a post-mortem conference call held by the Clinton campaign leadership. In it, Hillary apparently said that the FBI Director’s actions during the campaign’s closing weeks cost her the election. It’s not a conspiracy theory, though, because she’s not claiming that this was Comey’s intention.

“There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful,” Mrs. Clinton said, according to a donor who relayed the remarks. But, she added, “our analysis is that Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.”

Mrs. Clinton said a second letter from Mr. Comey, clearing her once again, which came two days before Election Day, had been even more damaging. In that letter, Mr. Comey said an examination of a new trove of emails, which had been found on the computer of Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of one of her top aides, had not caused him to change his earlier conclusion that Mrs. Clinton should face no charges over her handling of classified information.

Funnily enough, in those last weeks — when Comey suddenly announced that the FBI was looking into Clinton-related emails on the laptop of the estranged husband of her closest aide and then, a few days later announced that the Bureau saw no reason to change its earlier view that Clinton should not be prosecuted — some of us began to wonder what he was up to. And of course conspiratorial explanations were raised as well as the usual cock-up theories. Comey is no J. Edgar Hoover, but still…

In a way, though, the most interesting thing about the Clinton debacle is the vivid demonstration it provides of how a modern, lavishly-funded, meticulously-planned, faultlessly executed, and digitally-delivered election strategy could be defeated by a campaign run by a contemporary version of a circus barker. The NYT report of the conference call makes this point well.

Before Mrs. Clinton spoke on Saturday, her finance director, Dennis Cheng, thanked the donors on the call, each of whom had raised at least $100,000. The campaign brought in nearly $1 billion to spend heavily on data efforts, to disperse hundreds of staff members to battleground states, and to air television advertisements — only to fall short to Mr. Trump’s upstart operation.

Donors conceded that, ultimately, no amount of money could match Mr. Trump’s crisp pitch, aimed at the economically downtrodden, to “make America great again.”

“You can have the greatest field program, and we did — he had nothing,” said Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat and donor to Mrs. Clinton. “You can have better ads, paid for by greater funds, and we did. Unfortunately, Trump had the winning argument.”

Of course nobody on the call was tactless enough to suggest that the failure might have had something to do with the fact that in a political climate fuelled by rage against political elites it might not have been a great idea to run someone who is, par excellence, a paradigmatic example of said elites.

I suppose — clutching at straws — one good outcome of the 2016 campaign is that it brings to an end the weird ascendancy of dynastic candidates in what is supposedly a democracy. Before Trump appeared on the scene, I thought it would boil down to a contest between the Bush and Clinton dynasties. At least we have been spared that.

‘Transparency’: like motherhood and apple pie

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This morning’s Observer column:

On 25 October, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, wandered into unfamiliar territory – at least for a major politician. Addressing a media conference in Munich, she called on major internet companies to divulge the secrets of their algorithms on the grounds that their lack of transparency endangered public discourse. Her prime target appeared to be search engines such as Google and Bing, whose algorithms determine what you see when you type a search query into them. Given that, an internet user should have a right to know the logic behind the results presented to him or her.

“I’m of the opinion,” declared the chancellor, “that algorithms must be made more transparent, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen about questions like, ‘What influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?’ Algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion of our perception; they can shrink our expanse of information.”

All of which is unarguably true…

Read on