Max Read makes his case via New York Magazine for how Facebook was the reason for Donald Trump's surprise victory on November 8th. Though, to be fair, "Facebook" is called out specifically due to its large online presence, but in reality all the "large and influential boards and social-media platforms where Americans now congregate to discuss politics" are to blame. The main reason why has to do with Facebook's "inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news" that is spread rampantly and effortlessly across the platform: Fake news is not a problem unique to Facebook, but Facebook's enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies -- i.e., the emotionally charged activity of sharing, and the show-me-more-like-this feedback loop of the news feed algorithm -- makes it the only site to support a genuinely lucrative market in which shady publishers arbitrage traffic by enticing people off of Facebook and onto ad-festooned websites, using stories that are alternately made up, incorrect, exaggerated beyond all relationship to truth, or all three. Many got hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of shares, likes, and comments; enough people clicked through to the posts to generate significant profits for their creators. The valiant efforts of Snopes and other debunking organizations were insufficient; Facebook's labyrinthine sharing and privacy settings mean that fact-checks get lost in the shuffle. Often, no one would even need to click on and read the story for the headline itself to become a widely distributed talking point, repeated elsewhere online, or, sometimes, in real life. When roughly 170 million people in North America use Facebook every day and nearly forty-four percent of all adults in the U.S. say they get news from Facebook, the spread of "fake news" is all the more detrimental. The problem is that Facebook seems "insecure about its power, unsure of its purpose, and unclear about what its responsibilities really are." Earlier this year, Facebook acted on what was right and wrong by censoring the iconic "napalm girl" photograph, later issuing a statement saying "These are difficult decisions and we don't always get it right." Of course, lies and exaggerations have always been central to real political campaigns; Facebook has simply made them easier to spread, and discovered that it suffers no particular market punishment for doing so -- humans seem to have a strong bias toward news that confirms their beliefs, and environments where those beliefs are unlikely to be challenged.

Last night as votes were still being counted, statistician and editor-in-chief for FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver pointed out that while Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States, "it's possible, perhaps even likely, that [Hillary Clinton] will eventually win the popular vote as more votes come in from California." We now know that she has indeed won the popular vote by a slim margin. American journalist Carl Bialik adds via Silver's blog: Hillary Clinton could still conceivably win the election -- or she could lose the national popular vote. But since both outcomes look unlikely, we should start preparing ourselves for the possibility of the second split between the national popular vote and the electoral vote in the last five presidential elections. A coalition of 11 sates with 165 electoral votes between them has agreed to an interstate compact that, once signed by states with a combined 270 or more electoral votes, would bind their electors to vote for the winner of the national popular vote -- in effect ending the Electoral College. New York just joined this week. It wasn't enough to affect this election, but maybe today's result will spur more states to join. The results of this election echo the 2000 results, where Democrat Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote, but George W. Bush won the White House. It brings into question whether or not the Electoral College should be abolished in favor of the popular vote. As a refresher, the Electoral College is comprised of electors that cast their votes for president. Each state has a set number of electors that is based on the state's population -- the candidate who wins the state's popular vote gets those electors. Technically, on Election Day, the American people are electing the electors who elect the president. The New York Times has a lengthy article describing how the Electoral College works, which you can view here.

It's official: Donald Trump has won the 2016 presidential election. Slashdot reader Xenographic writes: Google's map of results is now calling the race for Donald J. Trump. This is something that Nate Silver jokingly predicted back on May 10th when he wrote "Reminder: Cubs will win the World Series and, in exchange, President Trump will be elected 8 days later." The House and Senate are also under Republican control. In other news, the Canadian immigration site has crashed under heavy load.This is how The New York Times, America's top newspaper reported the news:The surprise outcome, defying late polls that showed Hillary Clinton with a modest but persistent edge, threatened convulsions throughout the country and the world, where skeptics had watched with alarm as Mr. Trump's unvarnished overtures to disillusioned voters took hold. The triumph for Mr. Trump, 70, a real estate developer-turned-reality television star with no government experience, was a powerful rejection of the establishment forces that had assembled against him, from the world of business to government, and the consensus they had forged on everything from trade to immigration. The results amounted to a repudiation, not only of Mrs. Clinton, but of President Obama, whose legacy is suddenly imperiled. And it was a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters who felt that the promise of the United States had slipped their grasp amid decades of globalization and multiculturalism. Update: The New Yorker's Editor-in-Chief David Remnick, described the Election outcome as "an American tragedy." The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said, "Trump will bring global recession." BBC has an article on how the media worldwide has described Trump's victory. The Guardian captured the thoughts of world leaders on the matter. Hillary Clinton addressed the nation this morning and told her supporters that they all should keep an open mind and give Trump the chance to lead.

Editor's note: this story has been updated with more details, and also moved to the top of the front page because of its importance.

An anonymous reader shares a Reuters report: The election of Donald Trump as U.S. president puts new pressure on automakers and other manufacturers that have become dependent on open trade with Mexico, and raises the risk they will face higher costs. Automakers could also take a hit if instability in financial markets undercuts the confidence of consumers in the United States and other major markets at a time when growth in U.S. auto sales has stalled. Investors sold off U.S. stocks and the dollar in reaction to Trump's unexpected win. Shares in Japanese automakers, which also rely on Mexico as a production hub for the U.S. market, slid as well, underperforming the benchmark Nikkei index, which fell 5 In afternoon Tokyo trade, shares in Toyota Motor Corp were down 6.5 pct, Nissan Motor Co Ltd was down 6.0 pct, while Honda Motor Co fell 7.8 pct. U.S. manufacturing groups and companies on Wednesday said they want to work with the new administration.

Donald Trump's historic victory in the U.S. presidential elections has pushed up prices for the digital currency bitcoin. As the results for the election began to trickle in, the cryptocurrency quickly began to rise at around 2 a.m. London time. From a report on CNBC: The price for bitcoin was around 3.5 percent higher at 11:00 a.m. London time Wednesday at $733.84. Since November 4, the cryptocurrency has been stuck around the $700-709 trading band. The weakening dollar may have added to the rise, but the digital currency is also higher when priced in other currencies like the Chinese yuan, sterling and the euro. Charles Hayter, CEO and founder of Crypto Compare, said that the price is rising on safe-haven demand in reaction to the uncertainty created as a result of Trump's victory.

Republican nominee Donald Trump has won the US Presidential election to become the country's 45th president. Now that he is going to run the government, it's a good time to look back on the kind of policies and changes he is likely to bring in the United States. From an article on ArsTechnica:Trump's presidency could bring big changes to regulation of Internet service providers -- but most of them are difficult to predict because Trump rarely discussed telecom policy during his campaign. The Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules could be overturned or weakened, however, if Trump still feels the same way he did in 2014. At the time, he tweeted, "Obama's attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media. [...] With Trump's win, it's still not clear what a Trump administration would do on the issues of cybersecurity and encryption. As Ars reported last month, Trump and his campaign team have been vague on many such details. During the presidential debates, he brushed off the intelligence community's consensus that the attacks against the Democratic National Committee were perpetrated or silently condoned by the Russian government. But Trump did call for a boycott of Apple -- a boycott of which he didn't even abide by -- during Cupertino's fight with federal prosecutors about whether Apple should be forced to help the authorities unlock a killer's encrypted iPhone. [...] Trump's presidency, by some accounts, is likely to be a disaster for science. Most analyses of his proposed budgets indicate they will cause deficits to explode, and a relatively compliant Congress could mean at least some of these cuts will get enacted. That will force the government to figure out how to cut, or at least limit, spending. Will science funding be preserved during that process? Trump's given no indication that it would. Instead, many of his answers about specific areas of science focus on the hard choices that need to be made in light of budget constraints. With the exception of NASA, Trump hasn't identified any areas of science that he feels are worth supporting. More generally, Trump has indicated little respect for the findings of science.The Silicon Valley top heads were largely upset with the outcome of the Presidential Election, to say the least.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Yesterday, as groups across the country hit the final stretch of their get-out-the-vote campaigns, workers at NextGen Climate noticed some problems with their automated dialer program. As the team started its morning hours, the program used to initiate and monitor voter calls was suddenly clunky, and cut out entirely for crucial hours in the afternoon. The downtime wasn't a coincidence. Just after midnight on Sunday night, a post on 4chan's /pol/ board announced an impending denial-of-service attack on any tools used by the Clinton campaign, employing the same Mirai botnet code that blocked access to Twitter and Spotify last month. One of those targets was TCN, the Utah-based call center company that runs NextGen's dialer. According to the post's author, the company was also providing phone services to Hillary Clinton's offices in Nevada. "List targets here that if taken out could harm Clinton's chances of winning and I will pounce on them like a wild animal," the post reads. "Not sleeping until after this election is over." TCN confirmed the outage in a statement, describing the attack as "fairly sophisticated in nature." According to the statement, "the primary impacts were a slow site and a few brief periods of unavailability." The statement also makes it clear that NextGen Climate was far from the only group slowed down by the outage. TCN manages calling services for 2000 different clients, with a particularly brisk business during campaign season handling "everything from inbound information IVRs, outbound surveys to volunteer outreach."

Reader dryriver writes: There is no shortage of internet websites these days that peddle "information", "knowledge", "analysis", "explanations" or even supposed "facts" that don't hold up to even the most basic scrutiny -- one quick trip over to Wikipedia, Snopes, an academic journal or another reasonably factual/unbiased source, and you realize that you've just been fed a triple dose of factually inaccurate horsecrap masquerading as "fact". Unfortunately, many millions of more naive internet users appear to frequent sites daily that very blatantly peddle "untruths", "pseudo-facts" or even "agitprop-like disinformation", the latter sometimes paid for by someone somewhere. No small number of these more gullible internet users then wind up believing just about everything they read or watch on these sites, and in some cases cause other gullible people in the offline world to believe in them too. Now here is an interesting idea: What if your internet browser -- whether Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Opera or other -- was able provide an "information accuracy rating" of some sort when you visit a certain URL. Perhaps something like "11,992 internet users give this website a factual accuracy rating of 3.7/10. This may mean that the website you are visiting is prone to presenting information that may not be factually accurate." You could also take this 2 steps further. You could have a small army of "certified fact checkers" -- people with scientific credentials, positions in academia or similar -- provide a rolling "expert rating" on the very worst of these websites, displayed as "warning scores" by the web browser. Or you could have a keyword analysis algorithm/AI/web crawler go through the webpage you are looking at, try to cross-reference the information presented to you against a selection of "more trusted sources" in the background, and warn you if information presented on a webpage as "fact" simply does not check out. Is this a good idea? Could it be made to work technically? Might a browser feature like this make the internet as a whole a "more factually accurate place" to get information from?That's a remarkable idea. It appears to me that many companies are working on it -- albeit not fast enough, many can say. Google, for instance, recently began adding "Fact check" to some stories in search results. I am not sure how every participating player in this game could implement this in their respective web browsers though. Then there is this fundamental issue: the ability to quickly check whether or not something is indeed accurate. There's too much noise out there, and many publications and blogs report on things (upcoming products, for instance) before things are official. How do you verify such stories? If the NYTimes says, for instance, Apple is not going to launch any iPhone next year, and every website cites NYTimes and republishes it, how do you fact check that? And at last, a lot of fake stories circulate on Facebook. You may think it's a problem. Obama may think it's a problem, but does Facebook see it as a problem? For all it care, those stories are still generating engagement on its site.

An anonymous reader writes:Concerned over the spread of fake news on the social networking giant, US President Barack Obama has criticized Facebook, saying fake stories on social networks are spreading lies this election. Speaking at a rally for Hillary Clinton at University of Michigan, Obama said: "The way campaigns have unfolded, we just start accepting crazy stuff as normal and people if they just repeat attacks enough and outright lies over and over again. As long as it's on Facebook, and people can see it, as long as it's on social media, people start believing it, and it creates this dust cloud of nonsense," he told the gathering. A recent BuzzFeed investigation found that 38 percent of posts shared from three large right-wing politics pages on Facebook included "false or misleading information."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Consumerist: Lyft, Uber, Zipcar, and Maven have unveiled a variety of discounts and promotions aimed at enabling voters to get to the polls on Tuesday. The ride-hailing service [Uber] has teamed up with Google to create an in-app feature that aims to assist voters in locating their poling place and then getting there. "Given the important decision people around the country will make on November 8th, we wanted to make getting to and from your polling place easier than ever," the company notes in a blog post on the feature. Uber will be promoting the offer throughout Election Day with reminder alerts to users. Select Lyft users will receive 45% off their Election Day trip to the polls, The Verge reports, noting that getting back from your polling place will cost full price. The company said it would send emails Sunday night to customers in eligible areas, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, NC, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New Orleans, Nashville, New York City and New Jersey, Orange County, CA, Philadelphia, Portland, OR, Phoenix, Raleigh, NC, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. If you're determined to drive yourself to the polls, but don't have a car, Zipcar is offering members an alternative: a free rental. The service will make more than 7,000 cars available for free between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Tuesday. During that time, members of the service can reserve a free car through the company's app or website. Maven -- the ride-sharing business from General Motors -- will offer riders $5 off all day, a spokesperson tells The Detroit Free press.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google has been highly involved with connecting U.S. voters to timely information throughout this election cycle, by offering everything from voter registration assistance to polling place information in its search result pages. Today, the company announced plans to display the results of the U.S. election directly in search, in over 30 languages, as soon as the polls close. Web searchers who query for "election results" will be able to view detailed information on the Presidential, Senatorial, Congressional, Gubernatorial races as well as state-level referenda and ballot propositions, says Google. The results will be updated continuously -- every 30 seconds, as indicated by a screenshot shared by the company on its official blog post detailing the new features. Tabs across the top will let you switch to between the various races, like President, House, and Senate, for example. The results will also include information like how many more electoral votes a presidential candidate needs to win, how many seats are up for grabs in the House and Senate, and how many Gubernatorial races are underway, among other things. This data is presented in an easy-to-read format, with Democrats in blue, Republicans in red, and simple graphs, alongside the key numbers.

FBI director James Comey told Congress Sunday that the further investigation of emails related to Hillary Clinton didn't turn up anything that would cause the bureau to recommend charges against her. The FBI had reviewed over 650,000 emails under nine days. Upon hearing this, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supported started to question whether the FBI could go through all those emails in such a short period of time. We will never know for sure until the FBI explains its process to us all (which is unlikely to happen), so people turned to Edward Snowden over the weekend for answers. And Mr. Snowden didn't disappoint. From a report on GeekWire: How easy would it be to cull out the duplicate emails? Outspoken journalist Jeff Jarvis posed that question to Snowden in a tweet, and got a quick response: "Drop non-responsive To:/CC:/BCC:, hash both sets, then subtract those that match. Old laptops could do it in minutes-to-hours."

An anonymous reader shares a report on Quartz:In a sea of biased content, Wikipedia is one of the few online outlets that strives for neutrality. After 15 years in operation, it's starting to see results. Researchers at Harvard Business School evaluated almost 4,000 articles in Wikipedia's online database against the same entries in Encyclopedia Brittanica to compare their biases. They focused on English-language articles about US politics, especially controversial topics, that appeared in both outlets in 2012. In its initial years, Wikipedia's crowdsourced articles were tinted very blue, slanting more toward Democratic views and displayed greater bias than Britannica. However, with more revisions and more moderators volunteering on the platform, the bias wore away. In fact, the upper quartile of the Wikipedia's sample had enough revisions that there was no longer any difference in slant and bias from its offline counterpart. More surprisingly, the authors found that the 2.8 million registered volunteer editors who were reviewing the articles also became less biased over time.

An anonymous reader writes: "Three days before the US Presidential Election takes place, California-based security firm Cylance showed the world how easy it is to hack one of the many [electronic] voting machine models that will be deployed at voting stations across the US on Election Day." Bleeping Computer reports that "The machine that Cylance researchers chose for their test was the Sequoia AVC Edge Mk1, one of the most popular models... The technique researchers created modifies the Public Counter, but also the Protective Counter, which is a backup mechanism that acts as a redundant verification system to ensure the first vote results are valid." Physical access is needed to hack the machine, but the hack takes a short time to perform.
FBI Director James Comey said in September that America's voting machines would be hard to compromise because they're not connect to the internet, but these researchers simply used a PCMCIA card to reflash the machine's firmware. Comey also made the reassuring point that it's hard to "hack into" America's voting system because "it's so clunky and dispersed. It's Mary and Fred putting a machine under the basketball hoop at the gym."

Secret service agents rushed Donald Trump off a stage in Nevada Saturday night, CNN reports. "A scuffle could be seen breaking out in the audience, but it was not immediately clear what happened... Secret Service and police tactical units rushed in to detain a man [who] was then rushed by a throng of police officers, Secret Service agents and SWAT officers armed with assault rifles to a side room... A law enforcement official told CNN no weapon was discovered. The GOP nominee was apparently unharmed and returned to the stage minutes later to finish his speech." Meanwhile, an anonymous reader writes: "All but two U.S. states have accepted help from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to probe and scan voter registration and election systems for vulnerabilities, a department official told Reuters." Ohio is relying on the National Guard's cyber protection unit, while Arizona says they've held discussions with the FBI, DHS and state-level agents on cyber security. But in addition, "U.S. military hackers have penetrated Russia's electric grid, telecommunications networks and the Kremlin's command systems, making them vulnerable to attack by secret American cyber weapons should the U.S. deem it necessary, according to a senior intelligence official and top-secret documents reviewed by NBC News."

American officials believe Russian hacking efforts will continue through 2018, according to the Wall Street Journal. "By hacking and dumping emails, Russia is trying 'to denigrate the American electoral system, to make it look chaotic, make it look manipulable, make it look subject to intrusion, cheating and vulnerable so you can't trust it...to make us look no better than the Russian electoral system,'" said one senior White House official. Russia is also expected to extend their efforts toward elections in Europe.

"In Macedonia the economy is very weak and teenagers are not allowed to work, so we need to find creative ways to make some money," one 17-year-old told BuzzFeed News, which reports on a "strange hub" of over 140 political sites, all being run in the same small town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. These sites have American-sounding domain names such as WorldPoliticus.com, TrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, DonaldTrumpNews.co, and USADailyPolitics.com. They almost all publish aggressively pro-Trump content aimed at conservatives and Trump supporters in the U.S... The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don't care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives... The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of U.S. display advertising -- a declining market for American publishers -- goes a long way in Veles. Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook -- and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters... Most of the posts on these sites are aggregated, or completely plagiarized, from fringe and right-wing sites in the U.S...
Earlier this year they experimented with fake sites supporting Bernie Sanders, "but nothing performed as well on Facebook as Trump content," according to the 16-year-old who operates BVANews.com. The largest Macedonian sites now have hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook, and sources close to one site say it earns $5,000 per month, and has even earned $3,000 in a single day.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Among a slew on ballot propositions that Californians will be asked to consider on Election Day (Nov. 8) is Proposition 54, a proposed constitutional amendment that seems like a no-brainer. If passed, the law would require that the final text of all proposed legislation be published on the Internet for 72 hours before lawmakers can conduct a final vote. Typically, the text of bills in California is put online as it goes through the committee and voting process, but sometimes those bills can change at the last minute. Accessing those changes isn't always easy. The initiative, which seems all-but-certain to pass, has massive support from Charles T. Munger, Jr., the son of billionaire Charles Munger. The younger Munger, an experimental physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and a longtime Republican activist, has donated over $10.6 million to the "Yes on Prop. 54" campaign. The effort supporting the opposing view has taken in just over $27,000. Proposition 54 would also force the Assembly and State Senate to allow the public to record meetings as well, which could potentially be used in political advertising. So why would anyone oppose the bill? According to Steven Maviglio, the director of Californians for an Effective Legislature, a campaign committee formed to oppose Proposition 54. It all comes down to who is behind the initiative, and why. "The first thing you need to do is follow the money," he told Ars, pointing us to Munger, Jr. "He's been the top contributor to the California Republican Party. His goal is to disrupt the power of a legislature that's getting things done."

Last week, we wrote about a federal lawsuit that is challenging a New York state law that makes it a misdemeanor to show a marked election ballot to others. Today, we learn that a federal judge has refused to block enforcement of the law. Reuters reports: U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel in Manhattan said it would "wreak havoc on election-day logistics" to issue a preliminary injunction against the law, which prohibits the display of "ballot selfies." Three voters sued on Oct. 26 to block enforcement of the law, saying that sharing ballot selfies was a form of speech protected by the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. But the judge said that because of the imminence of next Tuesday's election, the voters needed to show a "clear or substantial likelihood" that their lawsuit would succeed before he could issue an injunction, and that they had not done so. "The public's interest in orderly elections outweighs the plaintiffs' interest in taking and posting ballot selfies," though they remained free to express their political message through "other powerful means," Castel wrote. Leo Glickman, a lawyer for the voters, said in an interview his clients were disappointed by the ruling and do not plan to appeal it, but will keep pressing their case ahead of the 2017 election cycle. "People should be able to express themselves freely by photographing their marked ballots and putting them on social media feeds," he said, adding that state legislators have expressed interest in having the law repealed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The White House said on Thursday it will establish 48 national electric-vehicle (EV) charging networks on nearly 25,000 miles of highways in 35 U.S. states. The Obama administration said 28 states, utilities and vehicle manufactures, including General Motors, BMW and Nissan Motor, and EV charging firms have agreed to work together to jump-start the additional charging stations. The corridors were required to be established by December under a 2015 highway law. The White House said 24 state and local governments have agreed to buy hundreds of additional electric vehicles for government fleets and add new EV charging stations. California will buy at least 150 zero-emission vehicles and provide EV charging at a minimum of 5 percent of state-owned parking spaces by 2020. The city of Atlanta will add 300 charging stations at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport by the end of 2017. Los Angeles agreed to nearly triple the city's current plug-in electric fleet to 555 vehicles from about 200 by the end of 2017. Of those, 200 will be for the police department. The city is also adding another 500 stations by 2017. One hurdle to the mass adoption of EVs has been the difficulty in finding places to recharge vehicles. In July, the White House said it was expanding a federal loan guarantee program to include companies building EV charging stations. The U.S. Energy Department said in July that charging facilities are now an eligible technology for the program that can provide up to $4.5 billion in loan guarantees.

Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the EU, the High Court ruled on Thursday. This means the government cannot trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty -- beginning formal exit-negotiations with the EU on its own. An anonymous reader shares a report on AlJazeera: The UK's High Court has ruled that Theresa May's administration is not allowed to trigger the country's exit from the European Union, or Brexit, without approval from parliament. Three senior judges ruled on Thursday that "the government does not have the power under the Crown's prerogative" to start EU exit talks. The case is considered the most important constitutional matter in a generation. The government plans to appeal the ruling before the Supreme Court. Plans for Brexit are being challenged in a case with major constitutional implications, hinging on the balance of power between parliament and the government. May has said she will launch exit negotiations with the EU by March 31.