So Facebook really is evil! 

I would have picked this as the excerpt:

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, relied heavily on the legacy of the first “social-media president,” Barack Obama. She had the address lists of the Democratic Party, worked with cutting-edge big data analysts from BlueLabs and received support from Google and DreamWorks. When it was announced in June 2016 that Trump had hired Cambridge Analytica, the establishment in Washington just turned up their noses. Foreign dudes in tailor-made suits who don’t understand the country and its people? Seriously?

Just goes to show you that you have to go with the "next big thing" and not "last year's big thing?

Seriously, mostly it still seems to me that it's the same situation it has been for a very long time: you can win if you GOTV very strategically within our gerrymandered country.

If we had a law requiring everyone to vote, like in Australia, the pandering from the analytics thing would be so complex with equally complex results? Yes, a lot more uninformed idiots would vote who could be highly influenced by fake news and alternative facts et. al. But I venture a bet that the results could be much more "wildcard." And that a higher power (or not) of gerrymandered districts would be so clear.

Thanks for a very thought-provoking article, Michael. It brought to mind a couple of others I recently read.

One questioned whether social media should be classifyed and regulated as a public utility. While I cannot find where I put the link to that one, Wikipedia has a collection of pro and con links on its Social media as a public utility page. I have mixed feelings about that but your article certainly tilted me towards the pro side.

The second I also take more seriously after reading yours. "Will Mark Zuckerberg Be Our Next President?  It’s a serious question. “He wants to be emperor,” several people have told me." I thought Steve Sailer's take on that one was very amusing which may be why I originally discounted it.