Ten Reasons Why Trump Was Elected And Why One Man Is To Blame: Mark Zuckerberg
Including ideas on how to solve our massive, ongoing disinformation crisis
I was a latecomer to social media.
Facebook had been around a whole five years before I reluctantly signed on. A writer friend of mine pushed me into it. “You have to do this,” she said. “Pretty soon there won’t be anyone who isn’t on Facebook. How else will you know what’s going on in the world?”
So, in a fit of FOMO, I overcame my revulsion for all things social and dipped my pinkie toe in the water. Right away, I saw the potential for banding together with other political lefties, and it wasn’t long before I amassed a small army of what another friend of mine referred to as “a cadre of furry socialists.”
We bitched about politics, mostly. Occasionally, I’d post a few photos of the garden, or my kids, or my cats. Then my move to Italy. To my surprise, I grew close to a handful of online chums I would have never met without the reach of an apparatus like Facebook.
Even though I lived at the time in a crappy apartment in one of the richest, most conservative zip codes in Houston, I felt less marooned. There were other people that thought just like I did. The social inequities that lit me up lit them up, too.
Then, at the beginning of 2015, new types of memes and posts started appearing on my feed. People I wasn’t friends with who belonged to organizations I’d never heard of were sharing anti-Hillary posts, police brutality posts, and a slew of pro-Bernie memes. Since I was already a Bernie fan, I didn’t think much about it at the time. Now, of course, I realize the majority of what I was seeing had been part of a Russian disinformation campaign (Russia is still the biggest disseminator of false and misleading information, by the way), one that had its intended effect. Having no idea I was being manipulated by a hostile foreign power, I found myself growing increasingly frustrated with the political status quo and more determined than ever to kick over the apple cart.
Sound familiar?
I pulled out of the disinformation nosedive after learning that my one-time idol Matt “Russia denier” Taibbi had gone dark side, as did my other one-time idol Julian Assange. Green Party candidate Jill Stein was photographed at dinner with the staff of RT, a network propaganda arm of the Kremlin. Glenn Greenwald, formerly a leftwing, quasi-libertarian pundit, became a frequent guest on Fox News. Almost every Super Progressive politico I knew had gone so left, they turned right—and that was when I started taking a hard look at where I was sourcing my news.
A lot of it came from Facebook.
MintPress News, for instance, the brainchild of Mnar Muhawesh, a broadcast journalism major committed to the idea of transparency—except when it came to divulging the names of her investors. In 2019, the Dutch whistleblowing collective, Bellingcat, reported that MintPress News was being financed by a pro-Assad lobby group, which certainly accounted for the organization’s pro-Assad news slant. It was one more nail in the coffin of a huge and growing distrust of my own Facebook feed.
Then I discovered that scores of legitimate-sounding “news” organizations that were anything but were burning across social media platforms: washingtonpost.com.co, Houston Chronicle TV, The Boston Tribune. There was no one controlling the floodgate, and more fake news came pouring in.
Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, known for his libertarian proclivities, had no desire to vet this information for accuracy. These fake news sites were held to no journalistic standard, often came from hostile foreign powers, and were shared because people were operating on the basic assumption that information is fact-checked—you know, the way information used to be.
Those days are gone.
So, I made a conscious decision to curate my news from reputable sources—newspapers and magazines that do actually employ fact-checkers. My short list includes: The New York Times (they are not perfect, but I try not to let perfect be the enemy of the good), the Washington Post (I hate Bezos, but let’s face it, the Post is a damn decent newspaper), The New Yorker, BusinessInsider, NPR, The Guardian, Reuters/AP, a handful of ezines like Wired, The Daily Beast, Politico, and reputable local papers from bigger metropolitan areas. Your list may look different, but it pays to do the footwork, thus ensuring you have reasonably reliable news sources.
But there are millions of people who never made that pivot. They are fed a steady stream of garbage every day, and it hasn’t occurred to them to turn off the faucet or even question where that water is coming from. Facebook’s algorithm keeps them in a state of disinformation agitation, especially around hot button issues like immigration, gun control, and government overreach.
We must never lose sight of the fact that Facebook’s only objective is to keep you on Facebook by any means possible. The longer you stay, the more ads you see. The more ads you see, the likelier you are to buy something. The more you buy, the more Facebook can charge its advertisers. And so it goes in one never-ending ouroboros of unfettered capitalism.
This is why Facebook doesn’t care about fake news. If fake news is what’s keeping us on the website, how naïve are we to think they’re going to do something to stop it? They’re not. Facebook’s oversight is designed to fail. Only when former President Donald Trump committed high treason on January 6, 2021, did public pressure become too intense for Zuckerberg to ignore. This was no crisis of conscience. He banished his cash-cow Donald Trump from Facebook only because his refusal to do so would have left him legally and morally complicit.
After almost five years of intense scrutiny of the 2016 election, we now know the reasons for Donald Trump’s unlikely victory as President of the United States.
They are as follows:
Our own willingness to believe that the articles we were seeing on our Facebook newsfeeds had been held to the same rigorous journalistic standard as “regular” news articles. I’m including Fox News (print and broadcast) in this.
A deep-seated disgust with the status quo in Washington, the flames of which were being actively fanned by bad actors in Russia, China, and other hostile foreign powers.
Years of GOP brainwashing convincing us that trickledown economics works, career politicians are dishonest, government is Orwellian and must be dismantled, states rights are morally virtuous, federal oversight is Sharia law, regulation kills businesses, and climate change is a hoax. All of these views are amplified across social media platforms, especially Facebook.
Legitimate instances of malfeasance and corruption on Capitol Hill that undermine our faith in the democratic process.
Trump’s decade-long run as an authority figure on a TV show.
Shocking amounts of racism, none of which was banned on Facebook where “white men” is a protected category, but “Black children” is not.
Decreasing prosperity, which eventually becomes resentment of government authority, “job stealing” minorities, etc. The United States has one of the most dismal income disparities in the world. The worst is South Africa, but we don’t shine in the comparison.
Social changes that many Americans who are 50 and up are ill-equipped to deal with, including gender fluidity, gay marriage, and the #MeToo movement.
The echo chamber effect of Facebook’s algorithm, which already balkanizes people into cells of like-minded individuals. I enjoy this feature, to tell you the truth. Instead of smiting trolls off my wall, I am able to enjoy interacting with people whose opinions I genuinely value. But in terms of gaining access to MAGAts to help them reevaluate their own belief system? No.
FBI Director James Comey’s unexplainable decision to open an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private emails one week before the 2016 election. Voters who were already on the fence now felt justified in letting the “non-career politician outsider” (Trump) have a chance.
The thing of it is, Trump’s campaign managers weren’t spending on TV ads. They were spending on Facebook. With Facebook, you get a user’s full attention. Cambridge Analytica helped the Trump campaign tweak their message for each set of eyeballs, based on the psychological data they stole. Black people (who traditionally vote Democratic) were discouraged from voting because (or so the message went), the system was rigged against them, so what was the point? White men were reminded continuously of the injuries being done to them by “unfair” accusations of sexual harassment, personal pronouns, and gun control. White women were shown gruesome “statistics” about Mexican rapists, unsafe schools, and neighborhoods flooded with wild-eyed immigrants.
What’s really alarming is that nothing has changed. Mark Zuckerberg is trotted out in front of various Senate subcommittees, but two questions into the grilling, it becomes laughably apparent these poor old dinosaurs have no idea what time it is. They don’t know what questions to ask because they are incapable of understanding technology or the outsized role it plays. Like Trump himself, most of them are probably hard pressed to send an email.
Even Facebook executives admit they clinched the election for Trump. Increasingly, however, it looks as though Zuckerberg may have won the battle but lost the war. After seventeen years of hegemonic control over social meda, Facebook is facing an exodus. Younger users are leaving in droves for other social media platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok, and SnapChat. Instagram and messaging platform WhatsApp are owned by Facebook, and may be artificially propping it up its market share, but as more and more social media platforms emerge, the structural flaws of Facebook become ever more apparent.
Why? Because younger users tend to go where their friends are. If Facebook is now associated with Mom and Dad—and requires a public-facing social media presence that won’t get the user in trouble with Mom and Dad—the youth demographic is scrambling to set up shop elsewhere. Nothing is going to make Facebook cool again. Not to them, at least. And there are an increasing number of adults who’ve closer their accounts as well, usually for the following reasons: information overload, privacy, banality, addiction, peer pressure, emergence of new platforms, productivity, and plain annoyance.
Facebook saw its number of daily active users decline by 2 million in the third quarter of 2020. But will Facebook’s inevitable demise solve the disinformation problem? We can inform and inform and inform the populace about responsible news curation, but if history shows us anything, it’s that confirmation bias is far more potent than inconvenient facts.
What must be removed is the financial incentive to promulgate fake news and disinformation without squelching our First Amendment rights to free speech. The only way I know to do that is to outlaw the monetization of algorithms, which upends the spirit of American capitalism itself. But as long as print news, broadcast news, and Facebook news are financed by ad revenue, we will continue to cycle closer and closer to democracy’s ruin. Even “publicly funded” NPR is anything but these days.
We need to either make a public utility out of Facebook or de-monetize its algorithms, full stop. We need real laws with real teeth in them regarding the oversight of Big Tech. We need tax-dollar funded newspapers like the ones in Northern Europe that are legally guaranteed their editorial freedom. And most importantly, we need to educate children, our heirs to the future, on social media literacy.
Zuckerberg’s philosophy of “Move fast and break things” may have sounded exciting back in 2004. But now that we’ve actually seen the the wreckage, breaking things just doesn’t seem that appealing anymore. Almost 700,000 Americans are dead. Trump loosed a howling mob on Washington. And we have yet to fully understand the ramifications of the massive social strife caused by Facebook.
At this point, shutting down your account isn’t going to save you.
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The idea behind Facebook is all well and good, but lacking Google's "Don't be evil" ethos, Zuckerberg moved fast and broke things before he understood where Facebook was headed and what it was breaking. It didn't have to be this way. Facebook could have been a grand uniting force and still made everyone involved a SHIT-TON of money. The problem is that Zuckerberg and his way-smarter-than-thou minions weren't smart enough to outwit evil. In a game of cosmic one-on-one, evil ALWAYS wins.
They ran before they could walk. They swallowed before they could chew. Before they knew it, they'd created a monster and had no way to pull it back into the barn. It's sad, really; such a good idea so thoroughly corrupted by people who weren't nearly as smart as they gave themselves credit for. What should have been a good thing for human kind is now thoroughly and completely gefickt.
A book you might like (assuming you haven't already read it) is Levitsky & Ziblatt's "How Democracies Die." Part of their argument is about how the unwritten "guardrails" (their term) of democracy are undermined in failed democracies allowing authoritarians to assume power legally and "according to the rules." In that context, Zuck fucked us only because the previous 35 years of assault on those guardrails by the GOP. They cite Newt Gingrich's first election to Congress in 1979 as the watershed event that derailed any pretense of civility &/or bipartisanship between the parties. Trump and Trumpism were simply the most recent little step on the highway to hell. (Which, unlike the road, is definitely NOT paved with good intentions.)
I mention this because I believe it is an error -- possibly even a catastrophic one -- to speak of 2016 as though it was a "comet," or to trace it down to one primary "Big" cause. Like the story of the frogs in the pot of water that is slowly brought to a boil*, the incremental nature of these steps is what makes the danger so desperately immanent.
*By the bye, that story is completely fabricated. It doesn't matter how slowly you bring the pot to a boil, the moment the temp becomes uncomfortable they are OUTTA THERE. Lacking a significant cortex and forebrain, frogs are incapable of denial.