Why I should vote for Donald Trump, too

La Montaña Rusa’s article — “Why I’m voting for Trump and you should too”–came up on my Medium feed recently. As of writing, it has received 4.8k recommendations. I don’t know whether to advocate reading it, so I’ll let you make up your own minds.

If you do, you might also be interested in Facebook’s new policy on clickbait.

Anyway, this all got me thinking about silos.

Yes these things are all connected. You’ll have to read on to find out why…

Silos

If you don’t know what a silo is, here are some pictures and here’s a definition.

The silo that I’m referring to though is Facebook.

Really, it’s social media in general, but the line above sounded catchier. Facebook is a silo because when we scroll down our News Feeds, we tend to only receive echoes.

If we read the opinions of our friends, they’re probably opinions that are very similar to ours.

If we share our own opinions, they’re read by people with opinions that are very similar to ours.

If we read opinion pieces, news articles, clickbait or anything else, they will almost certainly be opinions and values that are very similar to our own.

Facebook argues this filtering isn’t that significant, although other research argues that it actually is.

It is concerning though, that unlike people who occasionally go into a (literal) silo, scream and hear an echo, we do it every day without knowing it or questioning it.

A recent article on NiemanLab suggests that Facebook and Google make up 80% of referrals for news sources and online publishers. That means the vast majority of people are going to news sources from their News Feeds. If their News Feed is a silo, they’re only ever hearing echoes.

Now back to Trump

So what does this have to do with Trump and La Montaña Rusa’s article?

Well the reason I clicked into it was because I guess I kinda, sorta, semi wanted to momentarily break out of my own silo.

Or perhaps I just wanted to pick a fight with the author — whom I automatically assumed was xenophobic, white, ignorant — and with all his/her stupid reasons for advocating an infantile fuckwit like Trump. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say I wanted to get out of my silo.

I’m in Australia and we only recently got rid of a Trump-style fuckwit Prime Minister. He was a leader that I didn’t vote for and no one in my Facebook, Twitter or other silo-esque universes seemed to vote for either. He ate onions, he hated women, refugees, and lacked the common decency to adequately cover his junk. Yet he won fairly comfortably in an election. How— I asked, incredulous — no one even voted for him?!

Because silos.

When La Montaña Rusa’s article came up of on all places my Medium feed, I thought, what a great chance to challenge my silo. I didn’t really think s/he could convince me to change my opinion of Trump — I can’t vote in the US election, regardless — but I genuinely wanted to hear a different person’s point of view and for my opinions to be challenged.

I’m not going to spoil the article anymore for you. Despite what it sounds like, I did chuckle at it. I guess that’s a plug. So if you haven’t read it yet, you might as well.

It’s just shows though that breaking out of our silos is not as easy as clicking on a serendipitous link. You have to go out of your way to do it and you have to come into it with a curious and open mind. Taking the time to do it is pretty fucking important, so maybe actually look into why people are choosing to vote for Trump. Just as long as you don’t actually vote for him come polling day!