There was a lot of false and misleading information distributed online during this election, and literally spoken by the candidates (one more than another).

The biggest lie is actually at the heart of Trump's campaign, that he can bring back the jobs. Those jobs he's talking about haven't just been outsourced to other countries, in many cases they have been automated into oblivion. Trump promised to bring these back, but how can you bring something back that doesn't exist?

Mind you the Dems and Clinton had no substantial story to weave for the people that are hurting from the lack of these jobs. So people chose the fiction over no substantive story. It's an uncomfortable thing to tell people that everything they know is irrrelevent in the modern economy.

Part of the problem is that those in the media forgot about people who are different from them--- for whom those $30 billion could have meant the difference between permanent regional decline and a new start.

Who's going to go read white-papers after that sort of offer?

The living wage in London is £9.75 and everywhere else its £8.45. Nobody says the living wage council thinks that people outside of London are second class citizens. People think that the living wage council is wise to recognise that living costs are much higher in cities like London, and areas outside of London have a business cost advantage for locating operations outside of London because people living in smaller towns have lower living costs and hence can enjoy the same living standard on less income.

Don't be a jerk by taking the least charitable interpretation of a policy when you know full well that it's bollocks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

From the primary debate:

"While Clinton believes $12 an hour is the right federal minimum, she is not steadfastly opposed to the idea of a $15 hourly minimum nationwide. On Thursday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked if she would sign a bill from Congress setting the federal minimum at that level (something that would be politically improbable). "Well, of course I would," she said."

I'm all over something like a minimum basic income that would effectively do the same thing as doubling the minimum wage, without putting the cost burden on businesses that can't afford it.

The perk of a national $15 minimum wage is to remove any incentive US only businesses that may consider relocating to less expensive parts of the country. I'm sure it seems perfectly reasonable in a high cost of living area, but outside of that it's a jaw droppingly bad proposal.

The issue really needs to be completely depoliticized, and the minimum wage should really be set to some kind of local/regional indicator, and indexed to inflation.

But if we did that... politicians wouldn't get to flip this card out every 10 years to play it.

That does not make it a lie anymore than "yes we can" does.

Giving people optimism about the future, bettering yours and everyone's existence is motivating for everyone. I believe this for anyone I've ever managed, and for any project I've ever worked on. People work better when they are optimistic.

"Yes, we can" is a motivational statement encouraging people to try. Trump's "make America great again" is based on some misguided notion of nastalgia. When is this period that that statement harkens back to?

Remember, the decades after WWII were great for the US because literally every other industrialized nation had been bombed so badly that they could barely make anything at all. America did well during this period because we had no competition.

So how do we go back to that?

All politicians rely on this. Some of them deliver, most do not.

The policies being proposed mean that the next time there is a leak, or stolen/hacked e-mail, the party involved can simply deny it is real and then the publisher would have to take the story offline or face some sort of negative weight or ban in Google and Facebook.

Quite simply, you take away labor protections. Automation does not eliminate jobs, it competes for them. If people are cheaper, businesses will opt for people, even in the presence of automation. Robots won't work for free; people have proven time and time again that they will.

There is some evidence[1] that Trump supports this method, at least to the point that he can push the blame onto lower levels of government if jobs don't materialize.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/05/09/donald-tr...

I have said a lot of things on both sides and is hardly just some troll. We all have our triggers, this is one for me so whats wrong with that?

There's a problem here - first past the post voting - but there's also another problem: denial of the legitimacy of an opposition. The vast majority of the people who voted for Trump have valid opinions. You can't just dismiss them.

People who voted for him are not all misinformed racist sexist delusional hicks. There's too many of them to all be fooled. Many of them voted for Obama last time; the numbers make that clear.

Denial is the biggest thing I see in the US media right now, and it's worrying. Because it will probably lead to opposition to the symptom (Trump), rather than the cause (what motivated people to vote for him), and will promote internal opposition. It brings heat, not light.

I believe most of us are misinformed and delusional, and I do not believe people having Facebook as their primary news source is improving the situation.

"After the election, Mr. Zuckerberg claimed that the fake news was a problem on “both sides” of the race. That’s wrong. There are, of course, viral fake anti-Trump memes, but reporters have found that the spread of false news is far more common on the right than it is on the left."

>> but reporters have found that the spread of false news is far more common on the right than it is on the left."

does not make this

>> Mr. Zuckerberg claimed that the fake news was a problem on “both sides” of the race

incorrect.

One side does not get a pass because it was the lesser problem.

We are talking about whether it effects election which is what the article claims he is in denial about.

"Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, believes that it is “a pretty crazy idea” that “fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way.” In holding fast to the claim that his company has little effect on how people make up their minds, Mr. Zuckerberg is doing real damage to American democracy — and to the world."

Regardless of whether their assumption is true or not, I wouldn't expect the CEO of said company to just come out and say "oh yeah, sure, we're influencers like any other media and we forward fake news too". It's just business sense imho.

As for what Mark truly believes, on a personal level, you'd have to be a close friend, not a journalist recording, to get privy to it.

I agree with what you're trying to say, but you are being overly broad.

Talk to Trump supporters prior to the election, and with the exception of "anti-establishment", most of them will give reasons that they were tricked into believing.

Go to fact checking web sites and look at all the statements Trump continually repeated that were demonstrably false, and see how many of them the supporters believed (hint: many of them).

So yes, they were fed lies and believed them.

However, you are correct in that it was not the only reason why they voted for him. They believed those lies as post-hoc justification for their picking him. Really no different from people who pick any candidate, including Hilary.

what makes you think they were "tricked" any more than supporters of some different as-yet-uninstalled president.

This looks like a middle ground fallacy.

Also, I have a hard time believing that seeing one or two stray bogus stories is the same as seeing bogus stories everywhere you care to look.

In one case a vulnerable human being might have enough reason to doubt what they're reading, and in the other case they suddenly feel like the world is caving in on them.

2) In one breath you dismiss this article as elitism, and in the very next admit the problem of fake news, which is exactly what this article is talking about. It's not another discussion. It is exactly this discussion. I've never seen such a blatant use of straw man.

Thats what I am talking about, not sure what exactly make you say it's a straw man.

It's not enough of a problem i.e. it din't affect the election in any meaningful way.

Not sure why that's so hard to understand.

What fake news do is reinoforce what people already believe to be true

Sure. And it also reinforces things people don't yet know (because it's fake) but which fits into one's preexisting worldview. It's a multiplicative factor. An amplification.

The claim by the article is actually very measured -- that fake news is a part of the whole picture. Do you really disagree with that?

Fake news are easy to debunk and the same lie which takes advantage of network spread can also be debunked by the same measures.

Again if people really want to believe in something no amount of rebuttals are going to change that.

What's far more concerning is the kind of exaggerations that the traditional media use to blow everything out of proportion.

We all live in filter bubbles some in very tightly controlled bubbles others in more open bubbles but they are all bubbles.

I have yet to see any proof that fake news are effecting how people vote on any serious scale. Maybe some people here and there. But to claim that it's a problem for the election is simply another attempt at trying find a reason other than the obvious one, that many people who voted for Trump did so because they live in another bubble than those who votes for Hillary. That they have different perspectives and different problems, different dreams and fears.

Thats the reason we votes different and fake news aren't going to change the overall world view we have there.