Yeah, Facebook. Is Facebook why the wingnuts believed the Swift Boat lies about John Kerry? Or that Iraq had WMDs and helped with the 9/11 attacks? Have you ever talked to the people who believe this shit?

They actively search it out. They don't sit there and soak up fake news by accident. They toss aside real news, real books, and dig around until they find wackjob radio talk shows and fucked up newsletters to sign up for. Have you ever talked one of them out of believing this shit? When they see proof that it's bullshit, they interpret that as proof that the conspiracy has gone further than they imagined. They're totally invested in this worldview.

It's not Facebook. It's that the dumbest end of the bell curve is always there, always believing garbage. It's a matter of a catalyst coming along to bring them together and getting them to take action. That's why the word 'demagogue' is older than 'Facebook'.

You can't change the fact that these people exist. There's stuff you can control, like not pissing off half the Democratic base so they don't bother to even vote.

@1 Well FB has merely taken the place of chain emails.

Highly dubious claim that the conspiracy-mongering is 'non-partisan'. Regardless, as idiots are most susceptible to this shit and most of our electorate is comprised of idiots, very little doubt it was an important factor in the election.

Another wacko conspiracy theory to explain why Hillary Clinton lost.

All the Democrats that stayed home because they didn't want to vote for her, they had nothing to do with it, right?

Thanks Stranger, now I know why Hillary lost.
It makes perfect sense too.

I don't use Facebook, so I never saw all that fake news, so I was able to vote for Hillary.
And I did vote for Hillary.

@3 There is absolutely no evidence that the emails Wikileaks released were fake.

Here's an interesting piece from today's NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinio…

People who advertise on Facebook should heed Zuckerberg's belief that Facebook has no influence on its readers,

"The Balkans produce more history than they can consume."

-Winston Churchill

ANYONE who supported DJT and blindly bought his lies and hot air is crazy.

@8 Checked your links. It looks like other people spun the messages in those stupid ways. Not Wikileaks.

This is beautiful!! Keep up the great work Facebook!! You're all liked in my book!

@8 If Clinton didn't have several positions on issues depending on her audience (confirmed by Wikileaks material) there would be significantly less room for wild speculating.

Ok hold on. Just because this douche thinks he influenced the election doesn't make it so. Don't get me wrong: he and his kind (who also posted fake shit that was pro-Clinton) should all be floated out on a leaky raft in the middle of the ocean and left for dead with a can of spam and a rusty pocket knife. I just think confirmation bias and a lack of critical thinking skills (along with historical white privelege, of course) were what blew the election, not Facebook and/or some random jackass.

They did a successful character assignation of Hillary. It started years ago. Yaa, she isn't perfect but she is a basically decent person. How many people were there who thought Trump was pretty bad but said Hillary was just as bad? In the end it was the combination of WikiLeaks and the FBI memo being spun/distorted by Trump with new fodder every day that she couldn't overcome. We are so fucked by the deplorable/stupid people.........

Time for a generation to wise up and boycott Facebook and Twitter. Both are anti-public service for-profit major corporations with the sole pupose of making money off of users. The more untrue, sensational crap is posted to both, the more hits they get and more money flows in from advertisers. Anybody who sees Zuckerber as a free speech hero is a fool. He is the very definition of a sellout. I quit Facebook and Twitter and you should, too.

This supports my hypothesis that we're actually living in a New Dark Age... characterized by an "information white out" making it impossible/unlikely for the masses to validate the misinformation snow covering everything.

Just like the 'original' Dark Ages, characterized by a lack of information (controlled by the Church, books copied by hand, mass done in Latin, etc.): rumor, hearsay, manipulation, and brute power rule the day.

Information moves too fast to be countered effectively, and once people use it to reinforce their pre-existing beliefs, there's little anyone can do to unroot it. In the same way that Democracy is slow and requires lots of conversations VS. authoritarianism being fast (as only one opinion is required to make a decision), so too misinformations --specifically negative information-- travels quickly,,, and correcting it requires a slow, methodical approach.

We may have run into a fundamental "defect" of human psychology vis-à-vis the modern age.

--
Zuckerberg is a tool. A sexist 'bro'. Always has been.

@14 Frizzelle just reading something on the internet, takin it as fact without any investigation and post about it on slog? Surely that wouldn't happen, all posts on slog are vigorously facted checked and researched to prevent the same sort of incorrect information facebook spreads, and editor in chief Frizzelle makes sure of it.

;)

I love all these stories from the NYT on down that ignore their own responsibility for pumping up the publicity balloon of the first few months of Drumpf's campaign. They ladled the coverage on him thick, way more than any other candidate. They thought they were merely being entertaining, but instead they were making him legitimate at a time when he was having trouble getting people to take him seriously.

@19 Heh, that is somewhat of a dubious claim. Sure they gave him non-stop coverage. Most of it was negative. They did their best to take him down, stretching any claim they have to 'objective journalism' in the process. I'd say good reason to do that stretching. Trump is an unprecedented menace.

I know @19, good point, the whole election cycle was one fucked up paradox. The press buoyed Drumpf up then got slapped down as being the 'rigged media.' The press got played at the whim of an opportunist. Altogether on only a slightly more sophisticated level than fake facebook news.

The only worthwhile Trump legacy I can see down the road is that it seems more people are paying attention to politics than ever before... Hopefully this continues beyond the entertainment factor. And hopefully this scrutiny will be felt and ultimately influential.

You know, if the soi-disant News organizations had remained engaged in, you know, actual hard questions & scrutinizing politicians' "emotionalist" rhetoric, instead of promoting lightly examined 'soundbites' and inflammatory "news" in pursuit of the advertising dollar.. then maybe Drumpf couldn't have played them like sycophantic chumps.

As Matt Taibbi pointed out: "Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn't know how to turn the cameras off, even when it's filming its own demise."

They definitely come in for their share of the blame for this.
And it's not going to get any better in the near future either.

That's apparently what we get from an empire in decline.