Almost all of the popular communities online lean left, take your pick.
You have much slimmer pickings if you're a conservative. http://gab.ai recently launched as a pro free-speech twitter alternative, I would also check them out.
You have much slimmer pickings if you're a conservative. http://gab.ai recently launched as a pro free-speech twitter alternative, I would also check them out.
Funny, I'd have considered them to lean right, since I'm left, and don't see myself represented in them either.
I'm sure there's a name for this sort of cognitive bias.
Link?
Not much political stuff on the past day right now but if you look at the past month's posts about the US presidential candidates you'll see what I'm talking about.
Going by the coverage of the refugee crisis (more relevant to me in Austria) a while back it was looking the other way around, and I mostly stopped bothering with political subs.
It seems to me that your current election is a bit of a special entity, so this data might be a bit skewed. I don't know a single conservative/right/center minded person who would support the current repuplican nominee if she/he could. I think this comes from the fact that he is a very unique candidate. Saying that anti Trump is anti right doesn't acknoledge this.
There are also more general issues. Most public political discussions are not so much political but mostly ideological aka not meaningful. People who follow ideologies are self imposing an anti discussion barrier. Your two party system enforces this.
If I want political discussion and/or information then I talk to friends or read/share interesting long form articles. Democracy is complex and full of kompromises aka hard, so "quick and dirty" just doesn't cut it.
Ah, but you do, unfortunately, in the same way that non-drinking drivers have skin in the game of DUI laws and enforcement.
Like Reddit where /r/TheDonald is consistently at the top of /r/all, and stories about terrorism on /r/WorldNews devolve into xenophobic rants that stop just short of containing phrases like "the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim?" That's not too "left leaning" to me.
I suggest all of you do the same. You might find you are much better off, like I did. To be clear - by all means READ blogs and sites and stay informed. Just steer clear of the comments section. Vote at the ballot box and with your wallet. Not with your keyboard.
And as for discussions on Reddit or news websites, the typical tactic I see over and over is as soon as anyone who is in the minority viewpoint is starting to make any sort of sense, commenters whip out the laundry list of go-to techniques for intellectually dishonest attacks - name-calling, stereotyping, questioning motives, questioning knowledge/expertise/credentials, using incorrect assumptions and false premises, straw man attacks, claiming facts are just opinions, use of weasel words, or (my personal favorite) the claim of having "rights" that are not in fact rights at all (surprisingly common). None of these crap tactics address either incorrect facts or incorrect logic, which are the only two things that should matter.
It's amazing to me how ugly things have become. And it's not just politics. Go to virtually ANY youtube video with more than a few thousand views and read the comments. There are an inordinate amount of hateful/angry posts, even for the most subjective things like music. And somehow anything related to news devolves into a political debate.
Also /r/worldnews is HEAVILY censored to remove any criticism against islam in particular. If you see it it's probably because they missed a spot.
IMO, it doesn't matter if the platform leans left as long as it fosters constructive and open discussion. You're correct that a lot of the heavy handed moderation (censorship?) is on popular communities that trend left, but that's just a money related trend imo. Companies want to make their product a "safe" platform for investors
I hope we have Karl Marx' corpse wired up to a generator.
It's not that it's leftist. It's that the people online tend to lean leftwards, and people investing in online communities want to grab the largest portion of the available population.
I will say, however, that the left in the US (namely the Democratic party) certainly seems to be willing to pursue a lot in the name of money (like taking millions of dollars from corporate and financial lobbying), and a lot of leftists online are totally okay with creating echochambers (though that's certainly not their pursuit alone).
And, if you look at channels like Fox News, it has huge audience. Granted, online audience is different, but in this time and place, it's not that different. It's not 1990s anymore, using the internet is not for the elite anymore, no more than having a cellphone. Everybody now does that (not literally everybody but demographically pretty much all is covered).
So, why many online communities lean leftwards? I'd say because their organizers/maintainers lean leftwards. Those are usually people that are young, frequently college or early post-college age, frequently with background in liberal arts - that demographics leans left. And those that don't lean the same way don't feel comfortable there (and modern college left made making people disagreeing with them feel unwelcome practically into a competition sport) and leave. That'd happen and does happen with no money consideration involved.
It's _much_ more insidious, but I'll leave it at that.
If you do, then it's like spam, it will become the "default" content of the forum. If you don't, it will end up left-leaning as a "safe space".
There are genuinely incompatible populations for audience/contributors and you have to pick one.
(And if you have a hardline free speech policy where you refuse to delete anything, you'll end up hosting child porn. You have to have a deletion policy in order to have a functional forum.)
Can you give me an example of some content from gabai that wouldn't be on twitter? It's quite hard to get banned from twitter for mere opinion.