Blue Feed, Red Feed
graphics.wsj.com
graphics.wsj.com
My second impression here though is perhaps the more impactful -- most of what I'm seeing is just ugly, ugly headlines, and in both the red and blue columns. I don't know what I did right in my life that these headlines aren't currently the kind that I'm seeing in my news and Facebook feeds, but thank heavens I did it.
It's really no wonder that people are mad about things -- these headlines are basically begging them to be.
This really isn't "what a right wing person sees on facebook".
>What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse. The process had its origins in partisan talk radio at the end of the past century. The rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.
>So much of this was welcome. I relished it myself in the early aughts, starting a blog and soon reaching as many readers, if not more, as some small magazines do. Fusty old-media institutions, grown fat and lazy, deserved a drubbing. The early independent blogosphere corrected facts, exposed bias, earned scoops. And as the medium matured, and as Facebook and Twitter took hold, everyone became a kind of blogger. In ways no 20th-century journalist would have believed, we all now have our own virtual newspapers on our Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter timelines — picking stories from countless sources and creating a peer-to-peer media almost completely free of editing or interference by elites. This was bound to make politics more fluid. Political organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.
There's an interesting discussion to be had about this. It feels counterintuitive to say that more democracy and more equality is bad, but at least in media I think it's proving to be true. I think liberal democracy is going to be challenged going forward all over the world because of this and it may be difficult for many societies to stay that way.
[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny...
You can't just take information away or try to "curate" the information seen, that's what censorship is.
We just need to learn to live in a world where everyone knows too much about others and where it can be difficult to tell the difference between truth and lie.
Is that a fair and democratic process or just technocrats doing their best based on their own fallible models?
That being said, seeing the sites from the link above, it seems like there are more tabloid/fake sites being shared by the conservative side of the isle. I wonder if this has anything to do with those Macedonians and similar people that took advantage of the fearmongering of Trump to make a profit or if those sites have always been around.
How is Macedonia related to this?
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
Here's the thing: anyone who uses this site knows that algorithmic ranking systems are gameable. There are some protections against individuals or small groups repeatedly gaming the system, but Facebook has put a profit motive behind it. That, and stopping all of /pol/, or the 280,000 members from /r/The_Donald is not so easy.
I noticed this too. The percentage of verified news sources is very low on the conservative feed.
A portion of the media will conflate the idea that many racists would have voted for Donald Trump with the simplistic idea that most who voted trump are racist. Looking at the blue feed, that happened some time ago.
Next, opportunists on the other side will seize this and present the now non-controversial idea that white supremacy won, everybody else are sore losers and should get over it. Of course, the truth is much more complicated than that and you end up with a minority that would do harm believing that they are a vindicated majority, and many of the harmless majority will believe this too. Looking at the red feed, we're already at the sore losers, get over it stage.
Just as the polls got Brexit wrong, most got this election wrong. Yet in the UK, the media continue to report any opinion poll result that agrees with their own editorial perspective. What we end up with in the UK is not the will of the people, but a perverted variant of it.
I think the deeper problem boils down to the fact that many people do not want to be under-represented, but have no problem with being over-represented -- both in policy decisions and media coverage -- without acknowledging that they felt under-represented because they felt others were over-represented.
+1
And please stop blaming people for doing essentially what they want. If a very, very large amount of people are doing what they shouldn't be doing, the overall system is broken. This is why we have laws, instead of simply politely asking people to stop killing each other. It's why we have regulations, instead of nicely asking companies not to dump toxic waste into their backyards.
Right now, a huge amount of media is optimized for ads instead of information and it's actively harmful to our lives. This isn't a problem that'll get resolved by nicely asking the media to stop doing what it's been doubling down on for the past decade.
Either way it is difficult to have a good perspective on anything. I am quite saddened that internet was mean to openly share idea but its users are turning it into their own personal AOL.
Some examples:
"Here's some more incredible news that's sure to drive liberals even crazier."
"Liberal heads will explode in 3....2....1...."
"The amount of butt-hurt following Donald Trump's win has been insane"
Not sure I have any conclusions yet, just an observation.
A being a space where someone is free to express themselves. For the right, whether you agree with them or not, that space was no longer the mainstream.
By labeling yours a "safe space" and theirs as "hate space" you are part of the problem.
Note emphasis. More explicitly stated: the "safe space" that was invented/demanded by the left is why the algorithm created a "hate space" for the right. The red never asked for hate, it is what the left fed them.
Not correctly listening to your opponents' arguments is the actual problem here. Regurgitating arguments is the problem here. Presumption about another person's stance is the problem here. This is exactly how the working class in America got angry and voted. They were screaming to be heard and all they got is "you are part of the problem. Shut up, you are in my safe space."
As it turns out, the notion of having a "safe space" is as bad a "hate space," because in the end both are hate spaces.
Combine that with the generalization that occurs on the more polarizing subjects (life/choice, guns, violence, police, race. . .) It snowballs.
Especially in a culture where there is a fear of expressing an opinion such as 'my body, my life' or 'all lives matter’ or ‘guns don't kill, people do' will often result in hate from acquaintances and strangers .
As a society, I think we're are still learning how to deal with the idea that anyone can say something with the potential to be seen by the masses, and be responded to in kind -and en masse.
Clicking "Hillary Clinton" for example displays an article about "raining down on Iran", an article about "butt-hurt muslims", an article furious about a possible presidential pardon for Hillary, one about "Hillary's Sick Scheme to Get Off Scot-Free", and one that says "People Have to Die - Hillary Clinton Supporter Calls for Violence". Comparatively, in the Blue feed for Donald Trump, I only see two "hate" articles: one misclassified as blue about a man getting beaten and one about "hate rapidly spreading across america". The rest is about Warren, ACLU support, Donald Trump visiting the white house, and "grieving for the nation".
Most of the articles on both feeds are garbage. I get a feeling not using Facebook day to day and sticking to just people I actually know in the friend list has been a godsend. Even my Twitter feed was awful the day of the election.