The summary is that in the aftermath of this election, Democrats and their allies are not just celebrating the fact that their preferred Presidential candidate won, but taking mean-spirited glee in the disappointment of Republicans - largely enabled by the preeminence of social media (for example, the "White People Mourning Romney" Tumblr).
The linked site is a pretty serious example of this phenomenon. The message behind it is essentially, "Ha ha, look how all the Republicans are dissociating themselves from Romney since he didn't win! What losers!"
I honestly haven't seen any of the gloating behavior this article's complaining about, on any of my social media feeds. I've seen a lot of relieved people, not a lot of 'poor winners'. This article seems like a lot of hot air.
What I have seen, though, is a lot of pathetic doom-and-gloom and sky-is-falling idiocy from the right wing -- people crying about how "my country is done for" and other such stupidity.
>What I have seen, though, is a lot of pathetic doom-and-gloom and sky-is-falling idiocy from the right wing -- people crying about how "my country is done for" and other such stupidity.
This has been my experience.
What's really nasty is that it's seemingly unavoidable.
I don't subscribe to political feeds, but folks like this lovely lady [1] will find ways to spread their vitriol to anything, even an exoplanet discovery [2].
I don't post doom-and-gloom stuff or that our country is done for, etc., but I have gotten responses from left-wingers as if I had, just because I am not an Obama supporter.
Not all conservatives are alike ... just because we have some looneys that vote the same way we do, does not make them our ally or mean that we agree with them. I'd imagine that the same is true on the left as well!
I have to admit to indulging in my fair share of schadenfreude this election, though I've personally only seen it directed at the campaign and right-wing blowhard pundits -- not at Republican voters, of whom the many I know are intelligent and good-hearted people.
However, this page really is not compelling to me, because these graphs are such a prime example of a blatant misuse of vertical scale. The y axis currently ranges from 12,046,000 to 12,050,000, which makes the decrease look like a sharp 45° falloff, when in fact it's fallen by 0.02% during the time shown. The numbers are the same to within four significant digits. So what is this supposed to be telling me?
Doesn't that happen every election? Just in the years I've been voting, I recall Republicans gloating over "Sore/Loserman" in 2000, mocking Kerry's loss in 2004 ("maybe he'll get another purple heart for that wound!" type of stuff), and Democrats mocking McCain and (especially) Palin's loss in 2008. That was all distributed over internet memes as well as in other forms.
Same on the local level in Texas (where I lived for some years), with partisans actually seeming happier about the TX Democrats' misfortunes than the TX GOP's success.
I agree that it's all the same. I think it feels more pronounced now giving the more personal (yet dehumanized) nature that Twitter and Facebook have taken since 2008.
I don't think it's actually hate. I'm not precisely sure what it is, but it seems to be the same thing that causes people to gloat when their favorite sports team wins. And sometimes it's pretty mean-spirited in the sports realm as well.
> I'm not precisely sure what it is, but it seems to be the same thing that causes people to gloat when their favorite sports team wins.
I disagree. Though sports fans have moments when they feel intense hatred for the other team, almost every fan knows that at the end of the day, it's just a game. They know that -- just like their team -- their opponent was just trying to win as a matter of pride.
The consequences of political contests are much more serious, which leads many political supporters to actually hate the other side. They don't see politics as a game; they see it as an idealogical war that directly affects their quality of life. Many actually think that politicians they don't agree with and their supporters are evil. If you want proof of this difference, just look at the comments on articles about sports rivalries and compare them to comments on articles about divisive political issues.
However, I'd guess that if the winning team of a sporting event was allowed to modify the rulebook for all future games, it would begin to look a lot more like politics over time.
It also helps that there are effectively infinite teams when compared to politics. If there was a sport with only two teams, and everyone was expected to be a fan of one of the two (passed down by your parents of course), we might approach a politics level conflict.
The primary emotion I can recall coming from the left during the George W Bush years was hate. Come to think of it, they still hate Bush, c.f. the town-hall debate question this time around.
I harbor no ill will towards either candidate, yet I find this funny and lightly informative. I also appreciate the technical side.
Coming from a country where self-deprecating humor is considered the mean, I must say that this didn't even remotely think "What losers!" about republicans.
Come to think of it, my first thought was "silly Americans", a thought aimed at the people that "liked" someone they thought might end up in office, and then un-liked him as soon as that didn't happen. I guess there's two kinds of shallow at work there:
- Mine, for thinking "silly Americans" when it's only a portion of them
- Theirs, for liking someone because he's popular
In the end, the dislikes say more about how people use Facebook (or maybe, social media in general) than about Republicans.
Finally, isn't it amazing what we can learn about human behavior with just a simple graph?
Most on the Left have come to view the Right, and the GOP in particular, as petulant, self-absorbed and obstructionist jerks. This perception only really came into its modern form when Newt Gingrich and the Republican House of Reps. forced the Federal Government to shut down in '95/'96 over Medicare (Medicare again!) and then voted to impeach Bill Clinton for getting a blowjob in '98.
Subsequent to this was the Presidential Election of 2000. Widely viewed by the Left as illegally stolen by the monied interests of the GOP putting the importance of victory over the legitimacy of their power. This President presided over the worst decade in American history since the 1930's, and he and his party (and their supporters) are widely blamed by the Left for the clusterfuck the world found itself in circa 2008.
Less than four years later, the GOP seems to have suffered from amnesia. They didn't seem to grasp that most of the problems they railed against Obama for not having fixed in four years were the result of their own bright ideas being put into practice over the preceding eight.
Certainly, Obama screwed up by trying to work with the GOP when he had the advantage in Congress. After two years of GOP obstruction, the midterms handed them enough of Congress to see that absolutely nothing of importance to the President (even if those things also important to everyone else) ever saw the light of day.
Whether or not these views are accurate, I think this is the mindset from which many on the Left are lashing out at the Right.
Any brief review of the righty blogs will show that the wingers are being just as derogatory toward the left, just slightly more quietly since they didn't win.
The left (IMHO) sees the right as having lost touch with reality (e.g. Sarah Palin), or as closeted racists. The right (in my experience) sees the left as weak, mewling followers of a Socialist secret Muslim bent on taking away their guns, making their children gay, and generally destroying 'merica.
I used to live in Central Pennsylvania and have a number of Facebook friends from the region. I saw a large number of 'closeted racists' came out of that closet in the 24 hours before and after the election was called - not my conservative friends, so much as their conservative friends.
The stereotypical liberal as seen by the stereotypical conservative, however, is a complete fantasy - in line with the fantasy that Romney had a chance of winning the election.
Plenty of people on all sides think that the other side is evil. I haven't read more than the one-word titles of Ann Coulter's books to know that she doesn't think that liberals are merely "mistaken".
not that i partake in the gloating, but considering all the echospheric rhetoric thrown at the president over the last four years (just think Rush Limbaugh) i think the gloating is very, very well-deserved
While this is not intrinsically fascinating to me (or, I imagine, most people, regardless of their feelings toward Mr Romney), I find it an extremely good example of the new types of data historians will get to use in the future.
I keep imagining Ken Burns ominously reciting Facebook Like figures, or trending Twitter hashtags, in addition to statistics on how many bombs were dropped in Iraq: "As Romney exited the political arena, public awareness of how close he came to the presidency seemed to erode, at a rate of over 550 likes-per-hour, he soon faded into the sunset of the American political landscape ...".
Obviously this is an exceedingly simple example, akin to the first steps in distributed computing like a Wikipedia wordcount, but I would love to see more sophisticated historical analyses in the near future.
"I find it an extremely good example of the new types of data historians will get to use in the future."
Potentially, but I have two concerns about this. First, I'm not familiar with the facebook api, but does it does it provide a way to determine an account's like count retrospectively? Or does this kind of analysis rely on scraping pages over the time-period of the analysis? Put it another way, could a historian in twenty years time reproduce this data, or does it have to be collected now because no historically useful record is kept? I suspect that online sources actually leave much less historically useful data than, say, newspapers on microfiche, despite online data being much easier to analyse.
And secondly, what happens to the data if/when facebook or twitter or google disappear or merge or change massively. As commercial entities, none of them are in the historical data business for anything other than short-term commercial gain. They have no obligation to the more distant future.
I wonder what historians think about everything going digital?
Romney already declared he was done running for public office if he lost, even before the election's end. I'm sure that has more to do with his fading into the sunset.
Im not sure 'fading into the sunset' is the right term. this is people logging in to Facebook and actively seeking out his facebook page to rescind their like. Just because he lost. People aren't forgetting Romney, they are trying to erase their history of supporting him.
Ah, it's been a few years since I logged into Facebook. If a like is analogous to a twitter follow, then this is a lot less interesting than how I was interpreting it.
But it's also possible that people no longer consider him important enough to be a part of their profile, without actually changing their view of him. People manage to clog up their profiles in a short period of time already, imagine what your FB account might look like in ten years if you never un-like that politician you supported, that band that you loved for a few months, that special edition chocolate bar you couldn't stop buying...
Look at the scale, against a base number of 12M+ facebook likes, losing hundreds is a rounding error. The OP seems to be getting the slant on his graph by manipulating it in rather grotesque ways.
P.S. Yes, people seem to be dissociating themselves from the Romney loss (and the man himself) in alarming numbers, none more so than within his party. But this does not seem to be a valid measure.
Romney never stood on his own. He was the anti-Obama for Republicans. Like a girl's looking for a guy to cheat with to get back at her boyfriend, the Republican party said, "Meh. You'll do." He never had any strong qualities, such as extreme faith views, or TEA Party ideologies. He's said he's done seeking public office. As a result, there's no reason for anyone to continue to "Like" him, as he serves no purpose for them.
I hate gloating as much as the next guy, but I see this as a legitimately interesting phenomenon. New media is a big deal for a lot of people here. Getting a deeper understanding of how things really happen? Bring it.
I think the reason may be less nefarious. This election is a case study of how much reality can diverge from expectations. And how people can hold on to these expectations till the very last moment, even though data says otherwise.
For this reason, its a very interesting election to study and analyze from a technology perspective. E.g. has the internet really succeeded in disseminating data and viewpoints effectively, or has it made our "bubble walls" more rigid. What is the role of fact checking and factual reporting when it comes to the media, has technology made getting to the truth easier or harder?
Very interesting for the hackers on this site...
Also, in discussing this election, its unavoidable that Romney is painted in a bad light. He lost after a spirited campaign that was alas never as close as he and his team portrayed it to be.
I don't think it's necessarily bias, but of course there could be a leaning in the community.
Losing a presidential campaign is going to prime the media and individuals to report about the team's failings and those of the candidate. Many criticisms are going to be valid. Likewise, Obama's campaigners will have successes that will be reported on. So I think we'd be seeing the opposite articles if the outcome of the election was different.
I think it's astonishingly cowardly, sheeplike, and maybe even un-American to curate your "likes" this way, just to disassociate yourself with a loser. If your convictions mean anything -- that is to say, if you have any -- then why would you change the public picture of them like this?
A Facebook “like” doesn’t just mean you like something; it means at least one of at least these options:
1. You like it.
2. You understand that “likes” are used by advertisers, distributors, etc., to track brand popularity, so you clicked like to support something that you might not personally like. (I’ve done this with, for example, friends’ projects that are of no actual interest to me.)
3. You want to see its updates. (I have a leftist friend who likes to keep an eye on the right wing and “liked” Romney on Facebook for exactly this reason, even though it’s essentially a “dislike”.)
There are probably a couple others. Peer pressure, for example? Besides which, I think it’s fair to withdraw a like from something if you believe it’s outlived its usefulness. If I’d “liked” a ballot measure that failed to pass, for example, I don’t think it would be in any way dishonorable to stop following it now, even if I still completely supported its aims.
Alternatively, you have the attention and the publicity, you could turn this into an a revenue producing product, sticking an ad somewhere on the page, and then providing it like a YTMND kind of "fill in the blank" system. At the very least, you could use the Romney thing as a springboard for a viral entry.
At the bottom, stick a "Make a graph for any project" link and commence.
At the very least, this could net you a decent handful of cash for minimal work, and, presumably, you already have the attention. Now take advantage of it before the spotlight moves off you.
Disclaimer: I say all this, not as a marketing type, but just as a geek who's run his own stuff for years, and I see a possibility to make a couple extra bucks with this well done implementation. Maybe it'd turn out to be a waste of time, maybe it'd score you some pizza and beer money every week, or maybe it'd serve as your entry as a "Social analytics" company or whatever. Either way, I think it's worth exploring.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
// Load the Visualization API and the piechart package.
google.load('visualization', '1.0', {'packages':['corechart']});
// Set a callback to run when the Google Visualization API is loaded.
google.setOnLoadCallback(init);
// Callback that creates and populates a data table,
// instantiates the pie chart, passes in the data and
// draws it.
function drawRealtime() {
var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable(headings.concat(likes));
var options = {
title: 'Realtime Like Count For Mitt Romney',
hAxis : {textColor: '#ffffff'},
colors: ['red','#004411'],
legend: {position: 'none'}
};
var chart = new google.visualization.LineChart(document.getElementById('realtime'));
chart.draw(data, options);
}
function drawHistoric() {
var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable(headings.concat([['1:59pm',12049076],['2:16pm',12048948],['2:30pm',12048820],['2:45pm',12048681],['3:00pm',12048559],['3:15pm',12048421],['3:30pm',12048297],['3:45pm',12048182],['4:00pm',12048077],['4:15pm',12047946],['4:30pm',12047807],['4:45pm',12047660],['5:00pm',12047509],['5:15pm',12047380],['5:30pm',12047247],['5:45pm',12047105],['6:00pm',12046942]]));
var options = {
title: 'Recent Like Count For Mitt Romney',
legend: {position: 'none'}
};
var chart = new google.visualization.LineChart(document.getElementById('historic'));
chart.draw(data, options);
}
var headings = [['Time','Likes']];
var likes = [];
console.log(headings.concat(likes));
window.setInterval(fadeAway,1000);
function init() {
drawHistoric();
window.setInterval(fetchLikes,1000);
}
var start = 0;
function fetchLikes() {
$.getJSON('https://graph.facebook.com/mittromney?fields=likes',function(data){
console.log(data.likes);
if(likes.length==0) { data.likes+=10; start=data.likes; } else {
$("#count").text("-"+(start-data.likes));
}
likes.push([new Date().getTime(),data.likes]);
drawRealtime();
});
}
function fadeAway() {
var opa = $("#romney").css('opacity');
$("#romney").css('opacity',(opa==0 ? 0 : opa-0.02));
}
</script>
It's all in the fetchLikes() that use the JSON api of the facebook graph.
It's launched through this : window.setInterval(fetchLikes,1000);
Forgotten doesn't exactly mean "unliked" though. Unless whatever pages I hit "like" on in some situation make lots of noise, my "like"s are near-permanent - I probably won't even remember it's there. If they do make noise, it really needs to be enough to be seriously annoying before I bother unliking.
Of course, I didn't like his page, but I'm probably not that atypical. A lot of people use facebook once in a great while and make almost no effort to keep their page up to date, reflective of current friends, etc.
This is an awesome idea. I thought the fading Romney in the bottom right hand corner made the site, until I realized he wasn't fading with the number of likes. Here's how I would improve the site:
Take the number of likes Romney started with as the election was called. [Number may not be available, estimate if not possible to recall exact.] Then, fade the Romney image out by setting image opacity as a percentage, currentLikes/peakLikes to give the image a "Back to the Future"-esque fade effect.
This stuff doesn't matter. I'll bet a lot of these are fake users that spammers want to keep under the radar and since they are no longer useful for this particular campaign, they are removing them. It's amazing the amount of developers out there that are not aware of how prevalent spam or fake likes are.
I don't do facebook but I did add him on google+ as well as Obama to keep abreat on things.
I say this as I was going to remove him the other day and thought I'd leave it a month or two and see if this social media embrasment was mearly a way to get into peoples pants, no I mean votes. So I left him, he gave a good acceptance of the results speech and with that be intersting on what he does now out of curiosity and my weird humour angle if nothing else.
A lot of Obama supporters would join Romney, by giving likes to be able to comment on the page (the opposite is true too). It's possible that a lot of these folks left, but who knows for sure...
For example, the fact that somebody is willing to manipulate a statistic is information in itself, and could be correlated (positively or negatively) to an outcome.
Part of working with big data is analysing all your signals coming in, and being able to determine which are useful and which aren't.
Social media may be a noisy, biased signal, but I doubt it is so noisy, or so biased, that no useful information can be obtained from it.
But if there are other sources which are known to be less noisy and biased then result can not worth creating model which can successfully incorporate this biased and noisy signal.
Careful, there's 'lying with statistics' here. A graph which looks like Romney's likes are in fast decline is actually showing a - shocker - 0.1% decrease in likes.
omg, there are so much better things to spend time on, this is ridiculous. Think about what all the well paid programmers are going to have to pay in additional taxes - if you can't image this you aren't a well paid programmer.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
The summary is that in the aftermath of this election, Democrats and their allies are not just celebrating the fact that their preferred Presidential candidate won, but taking mean-spirited glee in the disappointment of Republicans - largely enabled by the preeminence of social media (for example, the "White People Mourning Romney" Tumblr).
The linked site is a pretty serious example of this phenomenon. The message behind it is essentially, "Ha ha, look how all the Republicans are dissociating themselves from Romney since he didn't win! What losers!"