I'm not sure why the above is down-voted. There's a litany of evidence to suggest that this is actually true.
It's not a heavy claim. With Steve Bannon being appointed to the upcoming White House staff, there's been a parade of examples illustrating the blatant racism of alt-right figureheads.
While I appreciate the sentiment that Democrats lost the election by painting much of the population (uncritically) in very broad unflattering strokes, I don't really think the trend of people saying "Well you just can't talk about a group of people as a whole" is going to last. If you're unwilling to discuss groups of people as a single entity, the entire field of social science makes little sense.
I think maybe that we've lost sight of the fact that any time we talk about a group of people, we're really implicitly having a statistical discussion.
"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
- Hillary Clinton, Sep 2016
Spend a while in /r/the_donald.
1. No, I'm looking at differences in properties of samples drawn from different populations to estimate differences in those populations. Trump-related online forums have a higher fraction of racists than Clinton, Sanders, Cruz, Rubio, Bush, and Kasich forums do.
If Trump supporters in general had the same level of racism as supporters of those other candidates, then we would expect Trump forums to show about the same level of racism as the forums of those other candidates.
2. You seem to think the size of a sample as a percentage of the population is important. It is not. For large populations it is the absolute number of people in the sample that is important, not the percentage of the population.
I am making the assumption that supporters of various candidates are all about equally likely to decide to post on their candidate's forums. It is possible that there is something about Trump supporters that makes racist Trump supporters more prone to make racist forum posts.
That is what you should be focusing on to criticize my inferences about Trump supporters, rather than basing it on your inadequate understanding of elementary probability and how it applies to determining the sample size needed to make reasonably inferences about a population from a sample.
> I see a bright career at WaPo or NYT for you :-)
Have an upvote. I like it when people who are wrong are at least feisty about it.
I've looked at all the articles claiming that Bannon is "bad" (they use different words, of course), and I'm completely unconvinced. Seems like more of the "all Trump supporters are racist" meme.
Regarding the attacks towards Steve Bannon, I agree. They are only using examples of what other people who don't like him have said. Here is a great speech and Q+A he gave regarding Judeo-Christian values at the highly respected Dignitatis Humanae Institute [0]. Having listened to this speech amongst others, alongside his writings I can only conclude that what is being pushed are simply smears. Breitbart has taken so much power and money away from the mainstream publications, it is in their interests to take him down.
[0] https://soundcloud.com/buzzfeednews/steve-bannon-at-dhi#c=16...
edit: If anyone would like to dispute my opinion, please for good discussion provide primary sources that originate directly from Steven Bannon.
edit edit: please take a look at the Ask HN I have posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12967873
https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-banno...
I have seen that claim hundreds of times in the past few days.
"The social network has not given an explanation for its actions."
Banning is fine, but it would be nice if they can actually say in writing, citing reasons and evidence, why they banned them (even if lots of evidence exists elsewhere).
Banning without any explanation isn't of any use to anyone
I think that will have to be settled in court, but it will get messy for those companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier#Telecommunicati...
I haven't seen this same argument made for websites in particular. If you have good references for that, please do share!
btw, did you create an account just to make this comment? If so, why? It doesn't seem too controversial.
And I think that's the point. ISPs are precedent to show that a company being private isn't of itself a good enough reason to let it censor people. Google and Facebook are big enough that I think they should be considered public fora for speech. Hence the term "Gatekeeper" in the OP.
Just riffing here, but would it be fair to require Amazon to sell any product I want to make available?