Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbozeman | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how you got that sentiment from that graphic, which doesn't have jack shit to do with political affiliation.

I will put $100 down right now that if you did a statistically significant, unbiased, controlled, representative sample of verified Twitter users - as in people you can provably show are actual human beings - you'll find the majority are left-leaning.

Oh wait, I don't have to, Pew Research Group already did it...

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

Facebook is a different animal because more than half the planet uses it, and what we consider "left" or "right" as Americans is dramatically different than what other nations would consider "left" or "right" or "liberal" or "conservative".

View on HN

> verified Twitter users - as in people you can provably show are actual human beings

Verified means the account is authentic and of public interest. It doesn't guarantee that you are a person and further, the vast, vast majority of real people on twitter aren't verified.

as for the pew survey, it isn't controlling for many of the things that we know correlate with political affiliation, it is just reporting them as isolated facts. Just education and age would likely explain the delta in political affiliations within that survey. [1]

Sure this doesn't change the fact that the slight majority is Dem-Leaning, but it should raise serious doubt that its because of bias on the part of twitter instead of just plain old demographics of the internet.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-...

"Just education and age would likely explain the delta in political affiliations within that survey. [1]"

These concedes the point that Twitter users are liberal on average.

Verified users. Not all users.

Most of the verified users are journalists, who do lean left. I don't think that says anything about the overall user base of twitter.

Precisely, liberals aren't leftists in the least—at least not according to leftists. That is, world-wide, liberals and fascists have constantly worked hand-in-hand to form coalitions to keep the left out of power since WW1.

The true dialogue in America is happening amongst center-left vs. far-right ideologies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com