No news today, I really didn't have much time to dig into the feeds so you will end up with more links for tomorrow. I did want to think about the continued fervor over the Facebook data schemes at Cambridge Analytica, and the idea that this swung the election. Turns out that the story may have been overblown.

It makes a pleasing part of the evolving narrative, that online noise contributed to a fervent campaign going nearly nuclear. It's not surprising, we are talking about two of the least like candidates in history. Even if there were a non-Trump candidate who managed to be just as unpopular, it would have been chaotic. Adding in Trump's nonstop rolling reality show, there was no hope of a typical campaign.

I don't think there is much point in going down the rabbit hole on 2016. What I wanted to explore is the idea that all of this negativity was generated out of whole cloth by a marketing team and some Estonian teenagers working for the FSB. All of this marketing worked because we're a unique combination of gullible and cynical. We totally want to believe the worst about people on the other side of the political divide that we will share almost anything. Now the people we know who are Republicans or Democrats, but some illusive other that we can't quite define outside of a comment section argument.

If you think that Google, Facebook, Apple, et al. are going to be useful bullshit filters, you're wrong. Most of the attempts to curate content after the election and the recent Parkland shootings have been massive overcorrections, leading man mainstream conservatives to feel that they're suppressing on ideological grounds.

Which they are.

The gun thing continues to be a problem that we can't get our heads around. People from rural areas don't' see guns as threats because they don't deal with them in that context. While people who live in cities closely associate them with crimes. So when someone at YouTube wants to shut down videos that might be training the next mass shooter, they also round up a bunch of videos dealing with everyday gun culture like range shooting.

Of course, some of you are fine without that distinction, which is where the blowback against these platform comes in. They need conservatives in their audiences as well, it's just the numbers of mass media. They will lessen the filters and slowly open the faucet up, probably ending up right back where we were two years ago. They want to sell ads, not regulate user content.

People are the only thing that can fix debate in our culture. Kottke has a post on Carl Sagan's guide to not being taken in by bullshit. Thinking critically regardless of ideology is a good start to ensure you aren't fodder for the next swarm of disinformation.