Reaction to cascade effect on the election
There has been much talk about the popularity of Donald Trump during the election being due to a cascade of information, or misinformation, propagated through social media just prior to the election. This is a discussion about what to do about it. In the interest of making this discussion palatable to a wide audience of political backgrounds, I’ll try to be as objective as possible. Therefore, I’ll leave it to the other threads to argue weather the mass of information supporting Trump in the days before the election was true or not.
Prior to the election, it seemed the two sides were so diametrically opposed, there needed to be some action taken to bring people of opposing viewpoints together in a forum where they could listen to each other and try to understand each opposing viewpoint. Some might say this is part of the responsibility of the US Congress, so perhaps we should have written our congresspeople, encouraging them to be more receptive. The grassroots effort is also important though, so each of us can take a step and try to engage with people of differing political opinions with an open mind, and listen to their viewpoint. I was one of the majority who believed Hillary Clinton would win the general election, and thought it would be easier to wait until after the election to embark on this effort. Now that the outcome is the reverse of what I thought it would be, I find myself in a different position than where I expected to be, but I still think the effort to reach out is worthwhile.
There are two points about information phenomena surrounding the election that should be easy to agree about, namely:
1 – There was a huge discrepancy between the poll predictions and the election outcome.
http://predictwise.com/politics/2016-president-winner
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
http://www.270towin.com/2016-election-forecast-predictions/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html?_r=0
2 – There is a huge divide between the two political party affiliations in this country.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/01/18/the-growing-divide-between-republicans-and-democrats-in-one-chart/
http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/section-1-growing-ideological-consistency/#interactive
These two claims seem widely believed and are not very controversial, as demonstrated by the various web pages linked above. If the two tightly knit social groups mostly share beliefs within the groups, but not between groups, could that explain why poll predictions could be so far off? What if the polling processes were biased towards one group because of some way the polls were tied in to the social network structure? There must have been some kind of bias in the polling process, and if the network structure had anything to do with it, I suggest there is an opportunity for most of the audience reading this to take advantage of.
There is a good chance that you are in one or another of the tightly knit social groups (at the risk of over-simplification, I’ll suggest you may define these groups by who they supported in the presidential election). If so, you probably have close ties with other people with similar political backgrounds. Then if you actively seek out interactions with people from the other group by asking them about their opinions and collecting information, you stand to gain a source of information that you would not have had access to before. You may not agree with the opinions, but with an open mind you may have a chance to see a perspective you had not thought about before.
If enough people do this, we also stand to benefit socially. Better connected networks mean less surprises like the polling problem of this fall’s election. And understanding different perspectives will allow us to imagine solutions to social problems that could be palatable by people from diverse political backgrounds.