Month: November 2016
Did Chatbots Influence the Election?
An automated army of pro-Donald Trump chatbots overwhelmed similar programs supporting Hillary Clinton five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election, according to a report published Thursday by researchers at Oxford University. … The chatbots — basic software programs with a bit of artificial intelligence and rudimentary communication skills — would send messages on Twitter based on a topic… Their purpose: to rant, confuse people on facts, or simply muddy discussions.
— New York Times
Obama: Trump’s Election Is Not the Apocalypse
I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.
— President Obama, quoted by the New Yorker.
More Americans Want Trump to Focus on Healthcare First
21%
Of Americans want Trump to focus on the healthcare system during his first 100 days in the White House, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. Jobs took second place with 16% of Americans hoping it would be Trump’s first agenda item, while immigration came third – picked by 14% of Americans.
NY Times Sees Big Surge in Subscribers in the Age of Fake News
41,000
The number of new paid subscriptions to the New York Times in the week since Election Day, the largest one-week subscription increase since the paper launched its digital pay model five years ago.
Pre-Trump It’s Post-Truth
This year facts didn’t matter in the voting booth,
And to parse fact from fiction would take a sleuth.
You’ve got your facts, I’ve got mine,
So don’t even try to change my mind,
For we’ve entered and era (not an epoch, I hope) of the post-truth.
I Have My Facts, You Have Yours
“What people believe prevails over the truth.”
— Sophocles, from “Sons of Aleus”
Following Barack Obama’s election as president, there was talk about how the nation had entered a post-racial era, which proved not to be true. Following Donald Trump’s election as president, we have entered a post-truth era, and there’s little doubt about that fact.
We now have slid from “truthiness,” Stephen Colbert’s funny little noun that means “the quality of seeming to be true according to one’s intuition, opinion or perception without regard to logic, factual evidence or the like,” a short distance down a very slippery slope to “post-truth.” The Oxford English Dictionary has selected “post-truth” as its word of the year. It is defined as an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.
Its selection follows June’s Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election.
