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Comment by iamkroot | Hacker News Reader

I have often wondered: if Brexit and the 2016 presidential election had gone differently, would we still have this panic surrounding social media?

To me, a lot of it feels like people can't believe that a thinking human would ever vote for "the bad guys", so they go searching for some other explanation. It must have been some sort of brainwashing, that's the only reason someone would ever fall for their obvious lies!

Curiously, I very rarely hear people who complain about social media admit to it influencing their own political decisions, it's always their opponents who are being led astray.

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You would, eventually there would be some other trigger event which would make it clear that things arent normal.

Theres been a fundamentaly change in how information in society is organized, in terms of reach, scale, scope and frequency - and all the data analysis and nudging it entails.

At some point that vortex would create some event that would set off conversation and fear as the average person begins to discuss what is going on/

i think almost certainly not. i also tbink we’d have much less political correctness and wokeness

My thoughts are that most people's political views are shaped by the media they consume. For a large portion of the social elite, these views are shaped by their education and by the class views espoused in publications like the New Yorker, NYT, etc.

These prestige publications no longer have the influence they once had on other social classes because these social classes have access to a wide variety of new media enabled by the internet, and this loss of control is what's shocking to the political/social elite.

I think something along these lines must be what's happening because in terms of actual policy, Trump isn't that different from someone like Pat Buchanan.

Pat Buchanan is generally regarded as a political extremist. And yes, I'm very familiar with him based on his own speech and writing, not someone else's characterization of it.

Sure, but he doesn't provoke the intense reaction that Trump does.

Perhaps because he hasn't run for office in a quarter century? And while I find many of his views odious, he's more coherent and restrained in his rhetoric than Trump - he is a fixture on a weekly TV roundtable political TV show called *The McLaughlin Group if you want to sample his communication style.

> My thoughts are that most people's political views are shaped by the media they consume.

Are you sure it's not the other way around? I believe people's political views shape what media they consume. I agree with your point that wider availability plays a role, but I see it mostly in giving people a choice. If you only have one choice in media, you can either not read news or read that one. If you have multiple choices, you can choose whichever seems to make the most sense to you.

People don't want to feel like they are reading an article by someone who has no clue about the matter at hand, which it often feels like when they come from a very different ideological background, they will seem to have things backwards, focus on irrelevant details and completely miss the actual reasons.

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