The backfire effect is getting turbocharged online. I think we’re getting more angry and convinced about everything, not because we’re surrounded by like-minded people, but by people who disagree with us. Social media allows you to find the worst examples of your opponents. It’s not a place to have your own views corroborated, but rather where your worst suspicions about the other lot can be quickly and easily confirmed.

democracy and web literacy

The GOP intends nation-wide voter suppression.

• The House Appropriations Committee voted to defund the Election Assistance Commission, which helps states protect voting machines from hacking.
• The DOJ sent a letter to all 50 states, essentially instructing them to purge voter rolls.
• The White House commission on election integrity sent a letter to all 50 states, asking for detailed voter data including political party.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

Lawrence Lessig is concerned about impeachment happening while polls show that only 2% of Trump voters would change their vote. He says it's our duty to convince them Trump needs to go -- in spite of "how impossibly hard that seems".

Part of what we now know is that the large-scale manufacture of such "cheap and complex devices of great reliability" is linked to our excessive depletion of natural resources, our pollution and destruction of the global environment -- most especially our large and ever-increasing impact on the atmosphere. Heavily industrialization and consumerism are provoking long-term climate change across the planet. In the second decade of the 21st century, we realize that we are at a tipping point where the negative impacts are likely to exceed, increasingly, the positive effects that Bush evokes. So... how do we proceed from here? That's the important question. [Addendum: Donald J. Trump's undoing of environmental regulation and climate-change-mitigation and monitoring initiatives is, very clearly, a wrong pathway, unless the intent is to hasten the destruction of the stable and sustaining natural environment that allowed humanity to rise to this kind of thriving and global dominance.]

Are there ways of harnessing tagging, linking and associative tools like Hypothes.is to help pull together the disparate webs of evidence and arguments on climate change that will help us as a species understand the dangers and the risks? Are there ways in which such tools might increase the democratic and ecological effectiveness of knowledge and learning? Do they have the potential to shift cultures and mindsets? Can technology prove helpful here?

Masaniello (an abbreviation of Tomasso Aniello) led a revolt against Spain in 1647. Born and raised in Naples, Masaniello was a fisherman and fishmonger. In the 1640s, Spain, which ruled Naples, imposed a series of heavy taxes in order to help fund its wars elsewhere. The Neapolitans revolted on July 7, 1647, and Masaniello, a well-known man, attempted to discipline the mob. Eventually, he became the rebel leader, negotiated terms with the Spanish, and became "captain-general of the Neapolitan people." However, he began to act erratically, and by July 17, 1647, he had been assassinated.

Obviously, in this situation whoever controls the algorithms has great power. Decisions like what is promoted to the top of a news feed can swing elections. Small changes in UI can drive big changes in user behavior. There are no democratic checks or controls on this power, and the people who exercise it are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist

On Facebook, social dynamics and the algorithms’ taste for drama reinforce each other. Facebook selects from stories that your friends have shared to find the links you’re most likely to click on. This is a potent mix, because what you read and post on Facebook is not just an expression of your interests, but part of a performative group identity.

So without explicitly coding for this behavior, we already have a dynamic where people are pulled to the extremes. Things get worse when third parties are allowed to use these algorithms to target a specific audience.

any system trying to maximize engagement will try to push users towards the fringes. You can prove this to yourself by opening YouTube in an incognito browser (so that you start with a blank slate), and clicking recommended links on any video with political content.

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This pull to the fringes doesn’t happen if you click on a cute animal story. In that case, you just get more cute animals (an experiment I also recommend trying). But the algorithms have learned that users interested in politics respond more if they’re provoked more, so they provoke. Nobody programmed the behavior into the algorithm; it made a correct observation about human nature and acted on it.

The ACLU of Iowa reports that 11 percent of eligible Iowa voters--260,000 people--don’t have a driver’s license or non-operator ID, according to the US Census and the Iowa Department of Transportation, and could be disenfranchised by the bill.

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 So far in 2017, 87 bills have been introduced in 29 states to restrict access to the ballot, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. (And that’s on top of the 21 states that already passed new voting restrictions since 2010.)

Trump-Russia sock puppets posing as "Bernie bros" targeted women and black men with harassment on Twitter when they expressed support for Hillary Clinton.

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols

These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of lay people lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument.

It looks like French voters might make the same stupid mistakes Americans and British made -- either falling for bullshit lies, or failing to vote at all because they don't think their vote matters or they aren't thrilled with their options.

This excerpt goes to show that Rousseau's main reason for supporting democracy of laws and regulations is so that the voices of various crowds of people are more well heard than in a dictatorship. Rousseau states, "voting on them makes it my duty to study them", which he is saying that his job as a citizen when voting is to make the most justifiable decision based on what he has obtained for knowledge of the subject. I agree with democracy, but this statement by Rousseau shows the issue there is when it comes to democracy. There is not always a background of knowledge amongst crowds that vote for various future laws or regulations. I do agree that it is the duty of the citizens whom chose to vote that they should dig deep in history to obtain at least a background knowledge on an ideal, but today public is mostly swayed by simply the media. I also agree with Rousseau that, "My inquiries always furnish me with new reasons for loving that of my own country", because the more you get to discover of your country and how it was brought up based on the various ideals gives you a more appreciative mindset on what needs to be adjusted for the future.

26 March 2017. Russians protest government corruption. Police gave an estimate of 7,000 protesters in Moscow. Hundreds were detained.

When asked to explain a topic, students often realize that they don't understand it as well as they thought. The same thing happens when someone is asked to explain the consequences of a government policy. They tend to realize they don't understand the issue very well, and moderate their opinion.

We've read before about discourse as democratic, and this seems to challenge that.

Hypothes.is annotators should be active on this article...

Check out this book on the intersection of science and democracy.

The "voices of others"? Surely not.

Growing up as a conservative Christian, I was warned about secular, liberal relativism. Nothing’s really bad, who knows, it’s all relative. We had to be careful about such slippery slopes.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Balance_fallacy<br> balance fallacy - The mistaken assumption that two sides of an argument have equal merit, so the truth or solution lies somewhere between the two. In reality, one view is often entirely wrong, and should be rejected. Or both views may be wrong, and the truth or solution has not yet been considered.

Why won't "liberals" just accept that Trump is president? Because Trump is an evil, incompetent piece of shit who should not be allowed to hold any government position, let alone the presidency. It isn't just liberals rejecting Trump -- it's anyone with common sense and decency.

Well that's intense. And on the next page, with the thunder and lightening, it seems like oratory has even a godlike power. I guess I'm surprised to read this since he was so influenced by Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, and I tend to associate the Enlightenment with democracy and rhetoric in general with democracy, but at the same time, the idea of words and knowledge as power and the importance of rhetoric for leaders is also a huge thing. So I wonder to what extent Campbell's view of rhetoric was present, not just during the Enlightenment but throughout its history? Has there always been a tension between this "irresistible power" and democracy in terms of rhetoric?

Andrew Postman says his father Neil got it right in "Amusing Ourselves to Death": our situation is more like Brave New World than 1984. But it's like both. Constant entertainment is a big part of what got us here, but we also have politicians practicing newspeak, and excessive surveillance.

Jay Rosen on the challenges journalists face under Trump, and several suggested countermeasures. An important one is making direct connections with common people and listening to their concerns, which will help build trust.

An economist from Venezuela advises us that polarization is the main weapon of populism. We need to counter it.

A rant against those on the far left who refuse to compromise, and criticize centrist Democrats -- yet don't hold their leaders to the same standards.

How could political leaders betray what were supposed to be national values? How could brutal practices be embraced by ordinary Americans?

Or, as she put it, “Why did no one stop people from doing bad things?”

The answer you’re supposed to give to children – one I heard myself as a child – is “That’s just the way things were.” You’re supposed to say “Lots of good people owned slaves” or “It was legal then”. You’re supposed to pretend that historic injustices have either been resolved or that they were never that bad, that they didn’t linger and structure the politics of the present.

You’re supposed to normalize cruelty, and in doing so exonerate those who practiced it.

A lot of people will do whatever they can get away with. There aren't always enough people brave enough to bluntly say something is wrong.

One of the most alarming aspects of the rise of Trump is (or should have been) his embrace of the Orwellian lie.<br> ...<br> we are not talking about garden variety lying here — we are talking about the totalitarian lie: lies told, repeatedly, loudly and insistently, in direct confrontation with the indisputable truth. Lies purposefully designed to undermine the very capacity to make truth claims.<br> ...<br> It is a plain fact that our political system is compromised. Nowhere is this more evident than in the financial sector and its (non-) oversight, a bipartisan catastrophe two decades in the making<br> ...<br> It is simply not possible to shy away from the ugly fact that racism was an essential ingredient to his election.<br> ...<br> the playing field has changed, empowering some actors at the expense of others. Or put another way: no internet, no Trump.<br> ...<br> The internet is exponentially more pernicious: entry is free, accountability is absent, and — here we are more stupid — the ability of people to distinguish between fact and fiction has virtually vanished. We are living in a post-fact, post-rationalist, post-deliberative society, in which people believe what they want to believe, as if they were selecting items from different columns of a take-out menu.<br> ...<br> from this point forward we will always be the country that elected Donald Trump as President. And as Albert Finney knew all too well in Under the Volcano, “some things, you just can’t apologize for.” This will be felt most acutely on the world stage.

Three key skills of emotional intelligence -understanding emotion in self and others -harnessing emotion for useful purposes -regulating emotions in self and others

Finally, the free traders are beginning to understand how China has been using a pretense of "free trade" in its effort to dominate the world. It is almost certain that China will become more powerful than America. The only questions is whether America and western democracies can remain relatively strong enough to resist Communist China's domination. And to do this we have to prevent China from dominating electronics, computing, cyber, and artificial intelligence.

This is a very important issue -- the mainstream media bears much of the responsibility of Trumps having been elected, because they gave him so much free publicity.

But for me, hope is not a feeling. It is not an emotion. Hope is action. Hope is found in motion.

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Hope begins the moment that somebody stands up and says, “Let’s roll.”

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It is clear to me though that hopelessness and despair often lead to an inability to act. When that happens, we must rely on others to act. Anyone that was gone through trauma and faced extended periods of indecisiveness can understand this. This is why a sense of community is so important, and that we share in our action by relying on others to back us up.

The question that I think we should be asking ourselves is, what is it that my culture is preventing me from seeing?

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It seems that education is more about filling brains, than teaching people to think.

Education ought to be about drawing something out, not putting something in. One of the things that people should be taught at school, is to think critically about the things that they consider most indisputably correct.

-- Iain McGilchrist (The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World)

http://iainmcgilchrist.com/

In general I consider James Fallows a valuable public voice, but I find this article disappointing. It fails to talk honestly about the serious reasons for fear or anger than many Americans have toward the mainstream media and the liberal intelligentsia. Let me quickly list some of these reasons.

America's relative power in the world is rapidly decreasing. For the first time since the late 1800's America is no longer the world's largest economy by certain important measures. China is, and it it still growing much faster than we are. China is rapidly arming, and is already ahead of us in multiple different types of weapon systems. In thirty year it it could have an economy twice the size of America's and much more sophisticated weaponry.

There are large areas of America in which the real value of average incomes has decreased substantially, such as in the rust belt.

Political correctness means that many tens of millions of people with traditional values are being constantly told by the mainstream media that their value are all wrong. Any one who publicly dares question or provide counter arguments to this political correctness is subject vicious public attack.

Race relations are not allowed to be honestly discussed in our media. For month after month in both the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases the mainstream media's propaganda message was that those killings were unjustified murders -- when, in fact, the majority of the evidence in both cases indicated those killings were totally justified as self defense. The politically correct racism of the media hypes the notion of white guilt, but greatly downplays the much larger problem of black guilt, including the fact that blacks have seven times the per capita violent crime and murder rates as whites and that blacks murder twice as many whites as whites murder blacks.

So why aren't whites allowed to protest that White Lives Matter? Because that would be racist? No! It's because political correctness, itself, is a racist/sexist double standard.

And no major candidate but Trump has had the balls to attack political correctness as much as he has (although his crude attacks are neither well reasoned or articulate).

Deborah Meier points out that democracy has to be learned, and we aren't teaching it adequately. Most schools are authoritarian environments where students are taught, explicitly and implicitly, to do what they're told. We need to give kids experience with democracy -- productive debate, compromise, trial and error, and acknowledging one's own mistakes.

You want to know how stupid our democracy is: Home & Garden Television has more viewes than CNN.

I have not read this book by I saw the author's BookTV one hour interview. He said that only about 1/4 of U.S citizens know enough about most issues being voted on to vote intelligently. So no wonder our government does so many stupid and wasteful things.

To make democracy intelligent -- i.e., capable of making decisions that provide the greatest good for the large majority of its citizens over long periods of time -- we need to deal intelligently with the issues of voter ignorance, apathy, and stupidity.

We also need to eliminate the censorship of political correctness and mass marketing sponsored media, each of which in their own way prevent important sides of many issues from being properly aired in the public forum.

An article relevant to intelligent democracy, because it shows that opensource-like collaboration often out performs corporate of governmental organizations at solving problems well.

It seems that some (or many?) people who vote Republican consciously ignore policies that are against their interests. They either think the Republicans won't actually try to do the things they say, or won't be able to pass them into law.

In one of the most heartbreaking interviews in Kliff’s piece, a voter whose husband is waiting for a liver transplant was able to get health insurance for her family thanks to Obamacare. Yet she told Kliff that she backed Trump because “I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many people’s lives.”

In 2012, a Democratic super PAC convened a focus group to assess whether Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s support for the GOP’s fiscal proposals could be used against him. Yet the focus group’s reactions to these proposals resembled the conversations Kliff had with Trump voters in Kentucky. When the super PAC “informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed ‘ending Medicare as we know it’ — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”

TV writer and producer Danny Zuker suggests putting on a big televised music and comedy concert on inauguration day to oppose Trump, with all proceeds going to non-profit organizations.

Mike Caulfield points out that "digital literacy" needs to include solid knowledge of the Web and how to use it, such as search techniques and uses of specific websites. Principles of site evaluation are not enough.

From 15 Nov 2016, an insightful and entertaining rant about the 2016 election campaign and its outcome.

"Hillary Clinton didn't fail us, we failed Hillary Clinton."

Paul Krugman points out that our current situation is like that during the rise of fascism in the 1930s. And it is also like the situation during the gradual decline of the Roman Republic. Political norms are being ignored. Republicans are placing their party, their wealthiest campaign donors, and their careers, before their nation.

"Famously, on paper the transformation of Rome from republic to empire never happened. Officially, imperial Rome was still ruled by a Senate that just happened to defer to the emperor."

For most of my friends on the Left, the argument against Trump is about fitness: Trump, they say, is not fit to be President. I agree with this claim.

But that claim has been rendered democratically irrelevant. 62 million Americans heard that argument, and disagreed with it. That doesn’t make the claim “Donald Trump is unfit” false. But it does render it unusable by an elector as a reason not to vote for Trump. Whatever they were meant to be originally, we cannot now see electors as democratic guardians of our Republic. They cannot be entitled to second guess the judgment of the people with respect to an issue the people can reasonably be said to have considered.

I disagree with this. The very purpose of the Electoral College is to judge the candidate. That can mean telling the majority that their choice was stupid. (And depending on how many Electors think so, the House is still likely to consider the issue yet again.)

In an online guide made public Wednesday night, a number of those onetime Hill staffers say that the best way for individuals to derail the policy agenda of Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is to organize locally and badger their own congressional representatives to vote against individual pieces of legislation.

The guide argues that, like the “Tea Party patriots” who found common cause in their unified loathing of President Barack Obama, progressives who oppose Trump should stand against him before all else rather than try to articulate a policy agenda that has no hope of advancing while the GOP controls all three branches of government.

Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda

Lawrence Lessig on the legal constraints and ethical obligations of the Electors. (First published in The Daily Beast, 13 Dec 2016.)

In my opinion, if the Electors don't reject Donald Trump, they have failed to do the only duty for which the Electoral College was created. (Putting aside the fact that the actual majority voted for Hillary Clinton...) The majority can make a stupid decision. It should be the sworn duty of the Electors to judge the candidate.

Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda (Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen)

http://digipo.io/doku.php<br> The Digital Polarization Initiative<br> "The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news – from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."

http://phys.org/news/2016-12-pro-trump-bot-colonised-pro-clinton-twitter.html

http://politicalbots.org/?p=787 Bots and Automation over Twitter during the U.S. Election

http://politicalbots.org/ An international research group studying political bots.

The Web has become an insidious propaganda tool. To fight it, digital literacy education must rise beyond technical proficiency to include wisdom.

• Double-check every claim before you share.
• Be wary of casual scrolling.<br> Everything you see affects your attitudes.
• Don't automatically disbelieve the surreal (or unpleasant).
• Do not exaggerate your own claims.
• Be prepared to repeat the truth over and over.
• Curate good resources, and share updates to them.
  • It will reinforce the previous information.
  • it will boost search engine rankings of the collection.

A survey of voters asked if they remembered seeing a headline, and if so, whether they believed it was true.

It may come as no surprise that high percentages of Trump voters believed stories that favored Trump or demonized Clinton. But the percentage of Clinton voters who believed the fake stories was also fairly high!

familiarity equals truth: when we recognize something as true, we are most often judging if this is something we’ve heard more often than not from people we trust.

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if you want to be well-informed it’s not enough to read the truth — you also must avoid reading lies.

This is our internet. Not Google’s. Not Facebook’s. Not rightwing propagandists. And we’re the only ones who can reclaim it.

This is our nation, and our world.<br> It is up to us to reclaim it.

This sounds like the kind of platforms I'd like to have. Reminiscent of some of the discussion at the beginning of TWIG: 379 Ixnay on the Eet-tway.

A legal argument that winner-take-all allocation of Electors is a violation of the rights of the voters in the minority.

1. In summary, a winner-take-all system of allocating Electors by the states denies the minority of voters within each state any representation whatsoever within the Electoral College and ultimately in the case of the 2000 and 2016 elections, denies the plurality of voters nationwide their choice for President under circumstances in which the constitutionally established small state advantage made part of the Electoral College wouldnot. This is neither a reasonable nor a rational result in a representative democracy. This result was dictated by the winner-take-all method of allocating Electors used by the states. It is this state law method of allocating Electors that is an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and its bedrock principle of one man one vote.

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It’s perfectly clear that the Attorney General of New York or California could walk into the Supreme Court tomorrow, and ask the Court to hear the case. Delaware tried to do this exactly fifty years ago, but the Court ducked the question. But based on that complaint, were I a citizen of California, I’d ask my current AG (and future Senator) why hasn’t CA done the same thing? And were I a citizen of New York, I’d ask my AG the same. Why are these big states standing by quietly as their voters are essentially silenced by the unconstitutional inequality?

The less we expect of our people, the less democracy we have.

It is not only the right, but the duty of the Electoral College to reject Donald Trump. But we've never had a candidate as unfit for office as Trump, so that duty has been ignored and subverted. We need to do all we can to let the Electors know that we expect and support that they will exercise personal judgment to do what is best for the nation and the world.

Concerns about election integrity. Quite a few links.

This is an interesting look at Trump's personality, but it shrugs off the danger we're in.

Donald Trump is a liar, a cheat, a narcissist, and a petty bully with no principles. And Trump himself is only part of the danger. I have no doubt that some members of the 1% are actively looking for opportunities to flush democracy down the toilet for the sake of making an extra billion. And they may be colluding with wealthy Russians.

That’s how you move Trump. You don’t talk about ethics. You play the toughness card. You appeal to the art of the deal. You make him feel smart, powerful, and loved. You don’t forget how unmoored and volatile he is, but you set aside your fear and your anger. You thank God that you’re dealing with a narcissist, not a cold-blooded killer. And until you can get him safely out of the White House, you work with what you have. People in other countries have dealt with presidents like Trump for a long time. Can we handle it? Yes, we can.

I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the government.

Donald Trump has filled his staff with these liars.

Yascha Mounk of Harvard and Roberto Stefan Foa of U. Melbourne have proposed 3 criteria to measure the strength of a democracy.

• How important do citizens think it is for their country to remain democratic?
• How open are citizens to the idea of non-democratic forms of government such as military rule?
• How strong are political parties with an antisystem platform calling the current government illegitimate?

If support for democracy is falling, while opposition to democracy is rising, the democracy is "deconsolidating" -- in danger of falling to an authoritarian government. Under these criteria, democracy is in danger in a number of Western countries, including the US, UK, and AU.

Trump is dangerous. But his election has also angered many millions of people who don't like him. We need to take advantage of that.

We've been too dependent on the theory of monolithic power, "the idea that government and the representative leaders within our institutions are the primary means to change people’s lives." Government and civil rights organizations are necessary, but not sufficient. We can't sit back and depend on them to work for us.

"Together, we can redefine civic participation not by organizational membership but as movement-building. Movement-building is an ongoing process of building leadership, relationships and avenues for getting involved."

Strategic Unity and Common Purpose: "We may disagree on specific policies, but we can be united around values and a common vision for the future — the American ideal of inclusivity, around civil liberties, around a secular government that protects the freedom of diverse religions, and around the right to decide what happens to our bodies."

Participatory Leadership: "We need participation-oriented leaders whose job is to empower and activate rather than represent and control, allowing communities around the country to replicate the same behavior"

Strategic Action: protest is good, but it isn't a strategy. "Strategic action feeds movement growth by ensuring each action leads people to another action."

Existing movements have been working hard (and sometimes bleeding) to fight for the rights most of us have taken for granted. "White Americans ready to fight must either prioritize minorities' struggles or we will all lose."

Donald Trump's "lies about voter fraud are a prelude to massive voter suppression." This has become typical of the Republican party. But Trump and his staff are sure to make it worse, and they're already showing it.

Widespread voter suppression targeting minorities, and suspicious "errors" in Wisconsin vote counts.

Lawrence Lessig is tired of hearing that the US is not a democracy. The US is not a direct democracy. But it is a republic -- a representative democracy.

Interview with a man who has run several fake news sites since 2013.

Well, this isn't just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue.

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We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.

Journalism faces an 'existential crisis' in the Trump era, Christine Amanpour

As all the international journalists we honor in this room tonight and every year know only too well: First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating -- until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison

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First, like many people watching where I was overseas, I admit I was shocked by the exceptionally high bar put before one candidate and the exceptionally low bar put before the other candidate.

It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth.

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The winning candidate did a savvy end run around us and used it to go straight to the people. Combined with the most incredible development ever -- the tsunami of fake news sites -- aka lies -- that somehow people could not, would not, recognize, fact check, or disregard.

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The conservative radio host who may be the next white house press secretary says mainstream media is hostile to traditional values.

I would say it's just the opposite. And have you read about the "heil, victory" meeting in Washington, DC this past weekend? Why aren't there more stories about the dangerous rise of the far right here and in Europe? Since when did anti-Semitism stop being a litmus test in this country?

J. Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science at U. Michigan, says yes, it's possible that the election was hacked. We should audit the results. And paper ballots should always be used in future elections.

"Farewell, America", Neal Gabler

If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans?

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The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate. They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right to determine the nation’s course.

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The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to get to the White House. ... When he ran, the media treated him not as a candidate, but as a celebrity, and so treated him differently from ordinary pols. The media gave him free publicity, trumpeted his shenanigans, blasted out his tweets, allowed him to phone in his interviews, fell into his traps and generally kowtowed until they suddenly discovered that this joke could actually become president.

Prof. Timothy Frye on the disturbing abnormalities of the 2016 election -- and their similarity to the status quo in weak democracies.

• candidate keeping his finances a secret
• threats to imprison a political opponent
• racism, xenophobia, and misogyny
• interference by a foreign government
• media circus
• politicization of security services (FBI)

Bill Palmer's opinion:

In order to believe that the official vote tallies are legitimate, you have to accept that all of the above legitimately happened: African-Americans in the south went from turning out in droves for Hillary Clinton in the primary to not caring if she won the general election. Donald Trump got perhaps seventy percent of the same-day voting in Florida. The polling averages were wrong for the first time in modern history. Trump beat his poll numbers despite having spent the primary season tending to fall below them. Clinton fell below her poll numbers despite having spent the primary season tending to beat them. In every state where Trump pulled off a shocking upset victory, he just happened to do it with one percent of the vote. And in an election that everyone cared particularly deeply about, no one really turned out to vote at all.

Paul Horner publishes fake news that is often shared widely. He claims that his stories are intended to be taken as satire like The Onion.

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

Leonid Ragozin: "We Russians have watched our president embrace anyone prepared to join his gang and do his bidding. Americans will see the same from [Trump]." Expect him to neutralize criticism over xenophopia, racism, and misogyny by welcoming people from various communities into his camp, and appointing some to government posts.

"Putin and Trump don't create ethnic movements, they create gangs in which the only criterion that really matters is whether you are 'with us' or 'against us'"

Steven Rosenfeld interviews Jonathan Simon, author of "Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century" about exit polls and vote counts.

Exit polls are not entirely trustworthy. But if they disagree much with the vote counts -- and especially if they tend to disagree in a particular direction -- it's a big red flag that something is wrong.

But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.”

The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly.

The problem is not JUST social media and fake news. But most of the false stories do not come from mainstream media. The greatest evils of mainstream media are sensationalism, and being too willing to spin stories the way their sources want them to.

Columbia Law Professor Richard Briffault on the history of the Electoral College and the issues surrounding "faithless" electors.

But a former employee, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, disagrees and says his old boss is being "more than a little disingenuous here."

...

"There's an entire political team and a massive office in D.C. that tries to convince political advertisers that Facebook can convince users to vote one way or the other," Garcia-Martinez says. "Then Zuck gets up and says, 'Oh, by the way, Facebook content couldn't possibly influence the election.' It's contradictory on the face of it."

Lawrence Lessig argues that the Electoral College should reject Donald Trump and elect Hillary Clinton.

Mike Caulfield says Facebook's feed algorithms are far from its only problem. The entire site design encourages sharing of items that users haven't inspected beyond reading the headline.

When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, “Let America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be,” he acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint, “America never was America to me,” and through the rest of this remarkable poem he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America, and the great dreams that they have for their country, that can never be extinguished.

-- Harry Belafonte

The forces that propelled Mr. Trump’s rise need to be confronted and defeated. It won’t be easy, given that tens of millions of Americans will vote for him and believe deeply in him. But if these forces are not defeated, what happened this year will be replicated in one form or another, and the Republican Party will continue to inflict great harm on our republic.

• Anti-intellectualism [Actually, outright insanity. Complete disregard for reality. Trump and his followers "believe" whatever they want to "believe". The Republican party has become a party of frauds and liars.]
• Political recklessness [Playing bullshit games instead of doing the duties they were elected to do. The refusal to vote on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee is one example.]
• Appealing to nativism and xenophobia [No shit. This article is otherwise forthright. He should have said fascism and white supremacy.]

Aside from the sins of the Republican Party:

• Major media failed us by giving this asshole all kinds of free publicity.
• Responsible journalists did their jobs. We need to support them, and we need more of them.
• Entertainers pretending to be serious political commentators and fake news sites have become a danger to democracy.
• Trump supporters: shameless racists, or just astonishingly stupid? [No, moron, Hillary Clinton is not just as bad as Trump.] Can we please improve education at least enough to counterbalance the ineducable?

the greater sin of the Republican Party wasn’t that Mr. Trump won the nomination by carrying a plurality of votes in a large field. It was that people who surely knew better rallied to Mr. Trump once he became the nominee. Some advised him, others defended him and excused him, and still others tried to ignore him.

And we should never forget who those people were, Paul Ryan.

Facebook hasn’t told the public very much about how its algorithm works. But we know that one of the company’s top priorities for the news feed is “engagement.” The company tries to choose posts that people are likely to read, like, and share with their friends. Which, they hope, will induce people to return to the site over and over again.

This would be a reasonable way to do things if Facebook were just a way of finding your friends’ cutest baby pictures. But it’s more troubling as a way of choosing the news stories people read. Essentially, Facebook is using the same criteria as a supermarket tabloid: giving people the most attention-grabbing headlines without worrying about whether articles are fair, accurate, or important.

GOP States Keep Ignoring Court Orders to Restore Voting Rights -- Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas, and North Caroline won't stop suppressing the vote.

The motivations of Trump supporters.

Jon Udell and Mike Caulfield discuss web annotation and personal wikis as tools for fact-checking on the Internet.

Conservative Media's Influence on the Republican Party<br> Jackie Calmes, 27 July 2015

laws nationwide are mixed on whether voters are allowed to take pictures of themselves in the act or of their ballots — "ballot selfies".

Federal judges have struck down bans on selfies in New Hampshire and Indiana, and rules have been changed in places like California and Rhode Island, but in many states it's still a violation that carries potential fines or jail terms.

There are laws against sharing any photo of your ballot in 18 states, while six other states bar photography in polling places but do allow photos of mail-in ballots