> What boggles my mind is when visiting sites like Reddit
Does it really boggle your mind though? Reddit operates as a left-leaning hivemind. The groupthink on that site has been strong for more than a decade at this point.
Does it really boggle your mind though? Reddit operates as a left-leaning hivemind. The groupthink on that site has been strong for more than a decade at this point.
If the moderators of all of these organizations were reflective of the general population, then maybe, but are they?
> [...] your calibration is off
Big social media moderation is systemically biased, for instance, Twitter is/was staffed overwhelmingly (at times almost exclusively) by people who support Democrats [1].
[1]: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/totals?id=D00006711...
That's a big claim in the middle of a totally different argument.
If anything, there's evidence that education has a negative influence in ways you may not expect. I seem to recall Germany being the birthplace of the modern university, "Humboldt's Ideal," and we all know how they ended up. In fact, doctors in Germany were 7x more likely than the average citizen to join the Nazi party. [1]
And the issue is more about disposition, the educated seem to have an extreme blind-spot because, as your argument evidences, they tend to think so highly of themselves. They also have the mental machinery capable of producing very enticing & sophisticated, but ultimately wrong justifications for horrible things. And in combination with a self-righteous moral self-concept, you're playing with some real fire.
Read C.S. Lewis's God in the Dock, I'll quote:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
Maybe it's useful to point out what you're not saying: That there is any sort of virtue in being "educated" (whatever that means).
Perhaps more to your point, most state run institutions seem to also lean left. This effectively turns your argument to "Educated people think like us and therefore we can trust them with the right choice for us."
I can call censorship wrong whether private or public, thank you very much. And I can agree and actually support their rights to do it as a private company. There's no contradiction there.
> you can't ask someone "please take this political spectrum questionnaire"
I'm not saying they should, I'm saying that it is an extreme hypocrisy that the pro-diversity, anti-systemic bias crowd seems to be completely mum about their own glaring systemic bias. There is a very high value in having viewpoint diversity where there are people in your organization capable of offering insights where the majority has a complete blind-spot. Instead viewpoint diversity is squashed and people who don't toe the party line are vilified.
Genuine disagreement should be embraced in organizations but all too often people are not afforded the dignity of their own sense of judgement.
The actual users always appear to be pretty evenly split - it's the moderation policies that are inevitably biased.