Seems to me
@Jemma - you're saying FB is conservative or alt-right? I'm not sure I own language that could describe how ludicrous that idea is. Or that shitposting by a few with a tiny relative budget of a few mil swung a billion dollar election.
Oh, you're just calling all voters, or most of them, morons. Perhaps more believable, but not a great way to make friends or influence people. Works about as well as calling them deplorables. They might not agree, and it might even motivate them further.
A test myself and a Canadian friend did was to create new, fake accounts (using mac-scrambled raspberry pies to avoid the more subtle trackers) and test for the echo chamber effect. There is extremely strong evidence for that - if an account looks at alt-right content - everything else disappears and it's bombarded with more of the same. Ditto progressive content. If both in the same account, then all but politics takes a back seat - say if the account was interested in the Reg, tech, or fashion - all gone.
This is both facebook and youtube (and included directed adverts, but we had to block those to avoid overloading the pies). And it became obvious that everyone is selling to everyone else by doing this test.
So the "Russian meddling" appears to be the result not of any Russians - it's the advertising characterization algos, deep learning - creating those echo chambers - and you can prove this at home pretty easily, don't take my word for it.
We did it to ourselves over greed in marketing.
Now let the down votes roll, as I just called everyone idiots who didn't even realize you were being silo-ed into echo chambers as long as they fit your confirmation bias - a well known cognitive issue of we lousy humans.
When I grew up we could agree to disagree and even be civil about it. Think about why that's changed...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
