Congratulations, Mr. President: Zuckerberg Secretly Called Trump After The Election buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/congra… by @RMac18 @cwarzel 
Under-appreciated dynamic in Campaign 2016 is newly intensive direct response retailing of Trump by Parscale. Focused on donations and merch, relentlessly A/B testing with FB’s VIP access, built upon new notion of consumers literally buying into candidate Trump like a product.
Facebook being the ultimate direct response marketing machine and Trump being the ultimate direct response candidate. When politics, democracy, marketing, and entertainment collapse into a monolithic expression of consumerism.
The American Right is advantaged by its embrace of hucksterism to retail and merchandise politics, putting the “mark” in marketing con jobs, likewise its embrace of using profits to influence policy. Left’s righteous criticism of such deception and corruption makes for asymmetry.
The argument over accusations of right-wing bias baked into Facebook is probably more structural than technical. It’s not so much the News Feed algo or moderation policy as much as it is the way conservatives make themselves into a market more than liberals do.
Evidence to support this hypothesis includes empirical data indicating a significantly greater quantity of conservative media produced and consumed on Facebook at a higher rate by its audience segments. mediamatters.org/research/2018/…
In the aftermath of Election 2016, @d1gi’s now famous visualization revealed the phenomenon of a vast and previously uncharted right-wing media ecosystem. wired.com/story/shadow-p…
