US Presidential Election Was Most 'Talked About' Topic In 2016, Says Facebook (phys.org) 88
What may come as no surprise to Facebook users, the social media company announced in a blog post that the U.S. presidential election was the most "talked about" topic on Facebook in 2016. Phys.Org highlights the other most-discussed topics in its report: The bitterly contested election in which Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton was ranked as the leading issue, followed by Brazil's political developments which included the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, Facebook said in a blog post. On the lighter side at number three was the runaway success of Pokemon Go, the location-based augmented reality game for smartphone users.
Other subject matters shared among Facebook's 1.79 billion users were more sober, with the fourth leading topic the "Black Lives Matter" movement, followed by the election in the Philippines of Rodrigo Duterte. Number six on the list was the Olympic games, followed by Brexit, the Super Bowl and the deaths of rock star David Bowie and boxing icon Muhammad Ali. Facebook said it measured leading topics by how frequently an issue was mentioned in posts made between January 1 and November 27.
Election? (Score:5, Funny)
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Tell that to Marty the Marmot [cheknews.ca]
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There was news about it, but most of it was fake.
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News stories about fake news are fake.
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We had an election? Why wasn't there any news about it?
I think it might have been mentioned in the Bible somewhere
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FUCK ABC NBC CBS FOX CNN MSNBC (Score:5, Insightful)
Time spent discussing the issues : 0%
Keep me busy blocking all the stupid posts (Score:4, Insightful)
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I never dealt with comments in the general. However with how I was treated by HRC supporters, after the primary was over I wiped it all. Facebook 2016 wasn't anything like Facebook 2006 or the Facebook 2004 I joined. It had become the lowest common denominator and was more or less subscribing to "Forwards from ultra conservative Grandma" and then both sides yelling at each other talking past each other.
I honestly don't miss it. I don't miss reading the random ass comments or links from people I cursorily kn
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Actually, the annoying part is /. making it clickbait for much of its traffic. I generally come here hoping to read about the latest news about things like Apple, Android, Windows, IPv6, Offshoring, et al. Instead, the bulk of it was pure politics, not even tech related politics, which I'd still understand. But stuff about the latest scandal about either Trump or Clinton
I really hope to read less of that. Not b'cos of anything I think or feel about our new president elect, but rather, b'cos I come her
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It's not over. We're getting a play by play coverage of the transition team. Every visitor Trump sees at the Trump Tower is interviewed endlessly. I didn't even know Obama had a transition team. I's sure he did but I hardly heard anything about it. I seem to remember some stir about one appointee owing a lot of back taxes but not much else.
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Scrutinizing the president is back in vogue with the everyone-but-Fox media. If we got nothing else from this election, at least we now only have one outlet carrying the president's water for him, instead of all-but-one.
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It depends on who you watch on FOX. Sean Hannity worships Trump but some of the others aren't that hot on him. I know Shepard Smith is often quite critical of him.
More like "most bitched about" (Score:2)
All my other friends bitched about the 2 choices, yet voted for one of the evils anyway.
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Re:More like "most bitched about" (Score:5, Funny)
...and so did you. Nobody said there was *only* two evils.
I voted Cthulhu. Because this time around, it was the lesser evil.
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Wrong. Everyone liked Trump, they just weren't allowed to admit it because the media would turn people against them.
That's not what the exit polls said. [cnbc.com]
A majority of voters did not like Clinton.
A majority of voters did not like Trump. (Slightly more than Clinton actually.)
That means there were people who did not like X but voted for X anyway. (X = Clinton or Trump.)
If you actually think that everyone liked Trump, then you are delusional.
As for people not being "allowed" to admit liking Trump, well what about all those people at his rallies? What about all those Republicans who supported Trump despite not being "allowed"
Re: More like "most bitched about" (Score:5, Interesting)
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As the exit polls showed, people lied to the pollsters.
No, there's no evidence of that.
The exit polls seemed to indicate that Clinton would win, but it was the vote counting from the various states, particularly the battleground ones, that ultimately demonstrated otherwise.
Granted, Clinton neglected the battleground states, obviously to her detriment. But saying the exit polls "seemed to indicate Clinton would win?" I say again: a majority of voters didn't like Clinton, and a majority of voters didn't like Trump. You can't infer a win for either candidate based on that.
The people who voted for Trump did like him, but were too pissed off at the media to give a shit about them. The ones who disliked both mainly sat out the election: that is why Clinton underperformed among groups that her campaign expected her to win w/ larger margins.
Partially, you have a point, Clinton did not connect with the Obama-revolution Democrats, and that cost her. But neither Clinton nor Trump showed a majority approval rating in th
Re: More like "most bitched about" (Score:4, Interesting)
Beware simple explanations for polling failures, particularly explanations which align comfortably with your existing beliefs.
It hasn't been a fantastic couple of years for the polling industry. After a period around the turn of the decade where people thought that polling had become a pretty precise art, we've had some major polling controversies in recent years. I actually get horribly nerdy about some of this stuff; I'm not a pollster, but I find polling fascinating.
Before I go any further; I'm in the UK and most of my knowledge is based on the UK polling scene. That said, the US and UK scenes have aligned quite a lot over the last two decades and, while polling a relatively small country like the UK will always be different to polling a very large one like the US, there are a lot of commonalities as well.
It's worth noting that most political polling is not a big earner for the companies that carry it out. It's a competitive market and margins for pollsters are not huge. Most polling companies are primarily market research firms who do most of their work for commercial clients. Political polling is often a loss-leader for them. It gets their name in the press and, if they can claim "we were the most accurate pollster for the election", that's a good way of winning more lucrative commercial business. The commercial incentive on most pollsters, therefore, is to be accurate. Contrary to popular belief/conspiracy theory, very few deliberately set out to mislead and those who do are easy to identify (generally by the wording of the questions they ask, or a refusal to disclose data) and mostly ignored by the mainstream media.
But back to some of our problems with polling in the UK in the last couple of years...
Our own 2015 General Election had a fairly major polling failure. The polling pointed to Labour and the Conservatives (our two main parties) being more or less neck or neck, to the extent that it looked almost impossible that either of them would be able to form a majority government. The final weeks of the campaign were dominated by speculation over the likely distribution of seats and the possible combinations of parties that might be able to form governing coalitions (which probably influenced how people voted).
When election day came, it became clear almost as soon as the polls closed that the pre-election polls had been very badly wrong. The Conservatives had performed somewhat above expectations and Labour had performed somewhat below them. Moreover, the pollsters had also failed to map vote totals into Parliamentary seats correctly (in the UK, each of our 650 constituencies elects a Member of Parliament and, as with US States/Districts, those constituencies do not all behave alike). The result was that, contrary to all expectations, the Conservative Party formed a majority government.
This triggered a bit of a crisis for our polling industry, not least since, following a highly accurate polling record from the 2010 election as well as various local, European and London Mayoral elections, a lot of weight and credibility had been attached the polling. The British Polling Council, which is a self-regulatory body for our polling industry, commissioned a post-mortem on what had happened.
The initial public narrative on what had happened was pretty stark. The newspapers (and various online forums) were filled with cries of "shy Tories" or "lazy Labour". These are two politically-comfortable labels that have been used to explain polling failures in the past. The first is the idea that Conservative voters might be embarrassed to admit their real voting intention to a pollster. Labour supporters like this one. The latter is that Labour supporters are too lazy to turn out and vote on election day. Conservative supporters like this one.
The actual post-mortem comprehensively rubbished both theories. The problem was one of sampling. Pollsters use a range of sampling and weighting techniques to turn a sample size of less than 2,000 people (a sample of around 5,000
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Yes, there were polling issues even going into the election. Several articles came out talking about how hard it was getting to poll people. Most if not all polling is done through landlines, to which younger people just don't have any more. There are strong differences between age groups and it's hard to guess how many people who say they will vote actually will. Small groups were weighted strongly and skewed differences. On the day of the election, exit polls were done where it was thought there would be
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Yes, one of the big stories of the US 2016 election does seem to be that states and counties which were not considered to be in play suddenly switched camps. What I'm less sure about is how much pollsters could have done to predict this.
Based on what little data I've seen so far, I think one of the tactical errors Clinton's campaign made was to focus too heavy on "attacking" (hitting not only swing-states, but also states traditionally in the Republican column) and not enough on defending states that looked
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I knew a few women that were excited about Hilliary being voted the first female president. I know a few other people that were excited about Trump "Making America Great Again." I'd say maybe 30% on either side seemed positive about their candidate. The other 70% seemed to vote while holding their nose to avoid the smell.
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What is Aleppo?
And so... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Talk about (Score:1)
Pop music. Talk about. Pop music.
Pop - pop - pop music.
D'uh (Score:2)
It's not like it's a single one day event. The whole thing is dragged out for over a year with the primaries and everything.
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It's still dragging on Slashdot, the guy who posted this constantly posts useless shit.
He may be retarded.
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This was the year when one candidate accused the father of another of killing JFK, then bragged in a presidential debate of having a big dick.
This election seemed to go on a lot longer than just a year.
Fake Title Alert (Score:2)
TRUMP! Was Most 'Talked About' Topic In 2016, Says Facebook
FTFY
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Indeed! Love him or hate him, he is entertaining. If you love him, he's entertaining at Making America Great Again; and if you hate him, he's comparable to one or more of the following:
1. Slow-motion train wreck
2. Batman villain in action
3. A 5-year-old who's had too much cake and ice-cream
Just can't turn your eyes away.
Wait for 2017... (Score:2)
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No need to hack elections when 46% of the electorate does't participate.
You only need to tender to the stupid fncks with a total absence of logics, science and facts.
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It'll never change. Short of what ever causes the USA's* end we're never going to end first past the post or expand to 5-10 parties like Europe has.
* We're barely teens on the timescale of nations. The people that honestly think the USA is the most amusing country ever and will last for ever have never opened a history book.
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* Ranked preference / instant-runoff voting in primaries and in the November general election
This. There is no perfect electoral system, but of all of them, runoff (and as a compromise, instant runoff) has been shown mathematically to be the "most" fair.
What would have been different? (Score:1)
Allow everyone to vote in BOTH primaries
In most states non-party voters could vote in any primary.
You know what happened in states where Democrats could vote for the Republican primary candidate? Many of them came in and voted for Trump. Because they thought, who could possibly lose against Trump?
Then they went back to the Democrat primary and voted for the one person that could...
Ranked preference / instant-runoff voting in primaries and in the November general election
Why would the results have been any
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Ranked preference / instant-runoff voting in primaries and in the November general election
Why would the results have been any different? If you add up all the Stein/Johnson votes it's not enough to have the whole election results turn out differently, even IF all such voters listed Hillary second - many would not have.
You're right, the results might not have been different for this election, However, an instant-runoff system would increase the viability and influence of down-ballot alternatives in the long run.
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem [wikipedia.org] shows that it is impossible to devise a voting system that will not fail in some situations. However, there is evidence that some systems are better than others, and instant-runoff is one of the better ones. [wikipedia.org]
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- Podesta in constant danger of somebody proving what "pizza" he's talking about
It's entertaining watching the 13 year old 4Chan/The_Donald not understand why anyone would talk about Pizza that much.
It's fairly evident they've never worked in an office. I'd say a good 80% of my work related e-mails are "WTF are we going to eat lunch on Friday".
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Trump's in violation of the Emolument clause
Not yet. He has to be sworn in first to be in violation. It probably will not take more than 24 hours before a transaction that violates it occurs.
Already in violation (Score:1)
That FEC election disclosure form, already has a 1 year prison sentence for making false claims. He claims to have 'overdisclosed' but actually he didn't reveal his own finances at all. He revealed a selected set of company finances that can be verified are fictional.
That form alone has a 1 year prison sentence and $50k fine.
But I really think people in the press missed the big picture here. His debt is far bigger than he claims $900 - $2 billion. His income is a tiny fraction of the amount claimed, the lar
Re: Already in violation (Score:1)
Those gerrymandered districts are usually called "States". Do you propose redrawing their borders?
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Do you propose redrawing their borders?
No, but it would be a good thing for state governments to actually represent the will of their voters and stop the winner-take-all bullshit.
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One has to admire your bravery and honesty in revealing your true name in this forum, mr Coward; I personally prefer to hide behind a pseudonym, because I am scared that anybody finds out.
So, as you say, your guy seems to have it all his way; of course that also means that later, when his policies turn out to be major disasters, you can't hide behind "Oh, but the senate/house/... opposed us all the way, so of course it didn't work out." And unless he turns out to be a truly astoundingly brilliant leader, he
332 out of 366 (Score:2)