The White House undoubtedly has an entire list of potential actions that throw red meat to Trump's base to distract from bad press (coughKavanaugh). Similarly, foxnews.com was completely devoid of anything pertaining to Manafort's guilty plea last Friday, in part because of Florence. I wonder if there's some way to quantify how much effort goes into engineering the news cycle, and if it's steadily gone up over time. Of course, it's not a characteristic unique to Republicans.
Heh, yeah, the Hannity car crash cutaway still gets me giggling. Other than what some companies have already done with pledging to stamp out fake news whenever possible, I can't think of a legislative solution. Social media especially favors echo chambers, and attempting to disrupt that with government intervention scares me more than leaving it alone.
I think the problem is that the platforms are so new that no one respects them. You can luck your way into a powerful YouTube or Twitter following and if you don't respect that influence you can like go on a racist screed and be unprepared for why people are angry. If you're just one thing just publicly comment on one thing or prepare to get your ass handed to you when you're casually white nationalist or people are upset by bad rape jokes. The internet isn't a respected platform so people treat it like a place where threatening to rape your mom is a thing you can do. Big old media companies treat it like a place to say whatever. Big new media companies treat it like a place where their users can say whatever. It shouldn't be. But I'm also not sure government regulation is the answer. I guess I think the answer will present itself in the near future.
Ah, we finally disagree on something! I'm in favor of protecting first amendment rights unilaterally, but that doesn't mean people should be free from the repercussions of the things they say. Obviously, this sets up a landscape defined by identity, i.e. anonymous vs. pseudonymous vs. direct attribution vs. the risk of doxxing, which is a sort of war we've seen play out over the last few years in several arenas. Example: a "verified" flair on Twitter carries weight, which I think is great. Anonymous accounts say particularly hateful things, of course, and the level of anonymity in any community (with permanent usernames, i.e. not /b/ or some equivalent) is directly proportional to the size of that community. Hence, Hubski is essentially pseudonymous because of its small size, and you and I get to very effectively police against shitty people, spammers, and bots. What I think/hope will happen gradually is that users in most semi-permanent communities will tire of sifting through the garbage spewed by the hateful and anonymous minority, and favor insightful, positive content. Yes, there's an implicit assumption here that people are generally good, and yes, existing Facebook interactions of zero anonymity may prove that my optimism is ambitious. One thing that's indisputable is that we're still in the infant stages of integrating the internet into our society, or vice versa. Things are tumultuous. They should be. The internet's a much bigger deal than Gutenberg's printing press. People may always have a platform where they can threaten to rape other people's moms or whatever. It would be stupid of me to ask the threatened to "toughen up" or disregard those threats, because I have no idea what it's like to be impacted by rape. And rape is staggeringly common, I know. Maybe if we had better mental healthcare, victims would be more impervious? What a pickle :(. The racism situation is on par or maybe even worse. I don't know how you'd measure that, and it'd be terribly depressing to study either/or as a profession. UghBig old media companies treat it like a place to say whatever. Big new media companies treat it like a place where their users can say whatever. It shouldn't be.
tacotact! Oh and I meant to tell you, when I went to the beach a couple of months ago, someone was wearing this. I almost yelled "IMPOSTER!!" at them, but I managed to keep my cool
Conservative media has an Achilles heel: its ad buys aren't worth squat. In the bidness we call it 'in the demo' - viewership is rated as X.X/Y.Y where X.X is "percentage of total homes tuned to your shitty show" and Y.Y is "percentage of total homes containing someone between the ages of 18 and 49 tuned to your shitty show." Note that in TV news, nobody wants to talk about that "in the demo" number. Here's Deadline talking about how Fox News in general is holy-shit dominant and Laura Ingraham in particular is ZOMG hot shit amazing. But you'll note that they're talking about "the news demo" for all this, which is f'n 25-54. Here's some actual numbers chosen at random: ZOMG Laura Ingraham is pulling a 0.4 in the demo. ZOMG Hannity is pulling a 0.4 in the demo. Fuckin' Hannity, Rachel Maddow, Fucker Carlson, Sam Bee, Laura Ingraham are all pulling in less than half a percentage point of all the TVs in which someone younger than 50 sits, which happens to be the same number for "My 600lb life." Kids don't watch TV. Young adults don't watch TV. Frickn' GenX has effectively cut the cord. And trust me: as soon as it's no longer worth the money for brands to advertise on Fucker Carlson, they'll stop. Hilarious, right? John Oliver's Catheter Cowboy, running on Fox News. What they didn't really dwell on is that the prevalence of ads on Fox News are for shit like mail-order catheters. And until someone figures out something funnier to do with those than anything you can do with Tide Pods, the advertising you can see on any shitty news show tells you (a) how very fucking little it's worth (b) how very fucking close to death its consumers are. I really feel this is a self-limiting problem. Self-limiting fast enough? Probably not. But faster than most people think.
I was stuck in a hotel in like April without WiFi so I watched more tv in that one day than I had in quite a while. It was awful. I watched a lot of msnbc and cnn and the commercials were exactly what you describe. Plus mail order bullshit products and lawyers
My thoughts went down similar lines. No matter what DOJ does or doesn't do, it'll be plenty more ammunition for partisans of both sides. I heard a story on the radio earlier today from some people involved in election infrastructure. One of them said that his worry wasn't the technological side or even the idea of foreign interference, it was Americans' complete inability to talk about anything political without falling into partisan ruts.
I think a lot of people, young folks in particular, have become pretty disgusted with the way political "discourse" has unraveled steadily over the last few decades, and especially how terrible people treat each other on the internet. It sounds pretty conspiratorial, but it makes me wonder whether the extreme political polarization is something that wealthy elites have actively tried to promote in an effort to turn people off of politics completely. According to wikipedia, though, we've just kinda flatlined at ~55% voter turnout over the last century. I think there's an (admittedly inconclusive) argument to be made that if more and more people are radically opposed to the other party, then a similarly sized segment of people must be getting turned off to politics altogether to maintain a stagnant voter turnout rate. I'm surprised that psychologists haven't linked people who attempt to keep up with the news (on either side) to higher rates of depression, mania, etc., but I'd probably only trust a case study of like N=10,000-ish anyway.Americans' complete inability to talk about anything political without falling into partisan ruts
Hopefully that's so in the case of younger people, as it's going to take a broad cultural shift. I don't see it as a plan, it's just a steady case of people trying to one-up each other in promising too much and blaming the other side when it doesn't work.