Democrats Are 3 Times More Likely to Unfriend You on Social Media | Hacker News Reader

Democrats Are 3 Times More Likely to Unfriend You on Social Media

fortune.com

27 pointsgeneric_user37 comments

> There are a number of possible explanations for the different rates at which various groups unfriended others over politics.

Throwing one more on the pile: Perhaps self-identified Democrats were more willing to create social-media links with broader sets of other people in the first place, which now means a correspondingly greater scope for un-friending during controversial periods.

It's easier to avoid un-friending a person if (A) you have very strong requirements before you mark them as friends in the first place or (B) your friend-set is small in absolute terms.

I'd chalk it up a lot more to population migration / economic trends than anything else. There are a lot more Democrats who used to live in now-Republican enclaves and have since cut ties with them than vice-versa. i.e. people who grew up in rural areas, went to college, then moved to cities upon graduation. In this election, much of the Republican vote came from places "left behind", whether you want to read that as "ignored to rot by the elite" or "disastrously clinging to a past that will never come back" depends on who you ascribe agency to / sympathize with, but I'd argue much of the "unfriending" is caught up in that storyline.

Its hard to say without a more detailed analysis. But there is a cultural drift towards censorship on the left.

No Platforming, Safe Spaces, Political Correctness are all movements that predominantly come from the Leftist Ideological spectrum.

So the willingness of a Democrat to censor ideas that disagree with there own is validated and 'normalized' by these left leaning movements.

"Safe Spaces" and "Political Correctness" are not censorship. They are about changing cultural interactions. I'm not a real "supporter" of either ideologies, but I believe its good to be nice to each other.

These movements do not 'changing culture' they create ideological bubbles where radical views get promoted and push the in-group ideology furtherer and further away from tolerance of other people with different views.

One of the points in the article was that Democrats are more willing to self segregate from people they have disagreements with on social media. Its not clear if this is a trend that is increasing or not. My guess is that it is. The left has wrapped these bubbles movements like safe spaces in a positive language that makes it acceptable for those in the bubble.

I agree with this sentiment, but would add that I'd rather people want to be nice to each other than be forced to be nice to each other. It's a lot more compelling to have reasons why being nice is good than to just tell people to do what we want them to.

You are being forced to nice to each other?? I'm confused what you are talking about.

From my exp I had three hard line Trump supports remove me. I don't generally post anything on FB, but I do sometimes point out issues with other peoples posts.

One removed me because he posted all these things about how it wasn't fair people called him racist, so I told him my personal experience of him calling Mexicans, Native Americans, and other people lazy and that that was racist.

Then two others stopped talking to me over chat because I debated them on their beliefs that poor people are only poor because they are lazy, immigrants are not here to have sex with "our" women, Muslims are not inherently evil, and on and on. They quickly grew tired of me poking flaws and not being a "liberal strawman" like they wanted and they stopped talking to me.

I'm not a democrat, but man it was a nasty election...

Tribalism in politics. A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

How is that "winning"?

It's winning for my sanity. I wonder how much this will push more people to simply not engage on FB and other online mediums.

I'd given up long ago on "social" media but my wife and others who still frequent those have essentially stopped since a couple of months before the election... email is back en-vogue.

Unfortunately, when it comes to politics, the only winning move is to win. Thermonuclear war serves no one, but political tribalism serves the victors.

Trump got fewer votes than McCain or Romney, and millions of fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, but he won because his tribe convinced the other tribe not to play in droves.

> Trump got fewer votes than McCain or Romney

A quick google search proves that's not true. That claim is actually one of the many fake news stories of this election.

I think doing this kind of fact checking is useful. I'd encourage you to include the best of the references you found in your comment. Would you share those with us here?

Just check Wikipedia. McCain 2008 got 59,948,323 votes; Romney 2012 got 60,933,504 votes; and Trump 2016 got 62,979,636 votes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...

Thanks!

Well, if I stand corrected, I stand corrected.

In a discussion on the subject on Facebook I commented: "I'd wager it was partially related to the fact that conservatives were far more likely to share fake/biased news stories than liberals. Note, of course, that liberals were far from immune as demonstrated by sharing the likes of Blue Nation Review, Daily News Bin, etc."

Good.

Sticking their heads in the sand is part of the reason Democrats are losing ground.

No. I unfriended people because I got sick of reading conspiracy theories like Sandy Hook was a government conspiracy to take away guns, that Obama was a secret gay Muslim, that Michelle Obama was really a man and that their children weren't really theirs.

Let's not forget the investigation by Chuck Norris that the government was secretly trying to declare martial law in Texas, "proof" of a 6000 year old Earth, and that Noah's ark was found.

And then news that people are using welfare to by weed in Colorado and that parts of Minnesota are under Sharia law....

If "sticking my head in the sand" means ignoring the looneys on the right that believe everything they read, guilty as charged.

Sounds less like an issue with a particular side, but more an issue with the people you are friends with.

And for every one of those you have a 'Dem' spreading nonsense about vaccines causing autism and about how GMOs will mutate you.

While the media might make it look like it does no side has a particular monopoly on stupid.

hold up, I agree with you but you can't say "for every X there's Y" because that's not at all true. "it happens on both sides" is a far cry from "both sides do this about the same amount" not to mention "both" itself implies there are only two sides and everything is flat.

How often does the mainstream conservative media go out of its way to debunk the idiocy on the right? The guy that started the "news" that people are using welfare money to by weed was actually trying to pull a prank on the right and see who would fall for it. Not only was there an uproar on the right. Fox News even reporter it.

The myth that vaccines lead to autism is repeatedly debunked by the mainstream media and they report all of the time about places where diseases on the rise because of anti-vaxxers

And while I use to think that nothing getting done in America without the support of big business was a bug. I'm starting to think it's a feature. For instance, once big business broke away from the religious right on issues like gay rights, the "moral majority" didn't have a say in the matter.

I expect the same thing to happen when it comes to immigration, trade, and the demonizing of "other". Trump supporters may have the numbers but they don't have the money.

Are the Democrats losing ground? With white, middle/working class voters, yes. But almost every minority leans Democrat, and it's the Republicans who have their heads in the sand about the reasons behind that.

Not to mention, Republican voters were found to be far more likely to share fake news. These two things are connected. Yes, Democrats are disengaging from discourse. But the quality of discourse in 2016 has dropped considerably. There aren't any particularly easy answers here, and heaping blame on anyone but ourselves is a pattern we need to get out of.

I'm curious where you have gotten this trend from, because it seems to be the opposite of what I can find. Compared to Romney, Trump only did slightly better with whites. Trump did much better with minorities.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/el...

I'm afraid I don't have a source to hand (on my phone) but I would absolutely believe that this year's election is atypical.

It will remain to be seen to what extent Trumpism and Republicanism coverage, separate or what in four year's time. Trump is much not a typical Republican candidate (to the extent that any of his positions can be nailed down) - to my knowledge, down-ballot races were more typical of previous years.

"I believe this year's election is atypical" is textbook burying your head in the sand is it not?

EDIT: it's the holidays and I extract absolutely no enjoyment from endless back and forth like this, so I'm going to shut myself up. Cheers, all.

Happy Holidays.

Debating during this time only takes us away from friends and family.

Let us agree to disagree and make peace until January 20th 2017:)

This must be all of that tolerance and diversity that we keep hearing about...

Okay, that sounds kinda snarky. But seriously, the level of hatred, contempt, and intolerance coming from the Left these days is a huge turn-off. Not saying there's no hatred on the Right, but they don't seem to broadcast it and revel in it the way that the Left does. Most of the vaguely hateful stuff I see from the Right is something that somebody on the Left dug up from some obscure place to try and smear the Right. It trips my irony meter pretty hard when they do all this, and then talk about how it's the other guy that's all about hate, in the most hateful tones of voice I've heard anybody speak seriously in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

I'll save people a click:

"The paradox of tolerance arises when a tolerant person holds antagonistic views towards intolerance, and hence is intolerant of it. The tolerant individual would then be by definition intolerant of intolerance."

“Michelle Obama. I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortable in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”

So said Trump's New York campaign co-chair. Today.

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/311686-trump-ny-co-chai...

I'm not saying the right is consumed with hate, or that the left has none, but if you don't see any hateful stuff coming from the Right then you're deliberately ignoring it.

I never said there wasn't any, but I did say that it's mostly the Left scouring the ends of the earth to dig up any kinda dumb thing that any 3rd or 4th string person ever said and shining spotlights on it to try and smear the entire Right. And that's nicely confirmed by citing a statement made by the "New York Co-Chairman for Trump's Presidential Campaign" published in "New York arts publication Artvoice". At least it was actually published today, so that's only 2 out of 3.

Fortunately, I don't have the time or interest to keep track of every nasty thing that anybody on the Left has ever said. But you will perhaps recall such things as Hillary calling people "baskets of deplorables", Obama calling people "bitter clingers", etc. Look at what they say about Peter Thiel, Sarah Palin and her family, any prominent black conservative, etc. Yep, they sure love LGBT people, women, black people, just as long as they toe the party line. If they dare to have their own opinion, you get to see how they really feel about diversity.

EDIT: it's the holidays and I extract absolutely no enjoyment from endless back and forth like this, so I'm going to shut myself up. Cheers, all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com