ShaunCammack

"There, but for the grace of God go I"

>Another thing might be considering having more columns for nuanced topics, and also have icons below each statement that has a counter-argument from another column.

I like this, thank you.

I would love to have the resources to do interviews and fieldwork. But we try and get these posts out within 6 hours of them trending, before the antagonistic narratives solidify and people move on to the next topic.

And although a fraction of the country uses twitter, we think it has a much larger influence. Twitter is like a narrative breeding ground, and those narratives are then picked up by journalists, which are then propagated in mainstream media and broadcast to people who aren't on twitter.

That's at least our thinking. We should probably be more explicit about what our methodology is (and why)

Yeah, this is something that we're talking a lot about right now.

Left and right is a useful analytical paradigm, but it's pretty crude. We're thinking about using more pro/con splits instead. But on the other hand, most people think that there is a those people over there who are the problem, and so identifying and humanizing them seems worthwhile.

For example, if someone thinks "The left are evil anti-americas," I want to show them how "the left" can be a reasonable human.

Absolutely, please shoot me an email (in my bio)!

Thank you! It's the first I've heard about it, I'll look into it.

Here's an outline of our method, which might help explain this (And please feel free criticize it):

First, we look at news aggregators and twitter trends to see what the big stories of the day might be.

Then we pull a bunch of tweets with our social media listening tool and try evaluate the story on three criteria: Momentum (is it trending and growing), Partisanship (are two sides talking about it), and Emotion (Is the story morally animating).

Then we collect data by pulling tweets through our tool, and focusing on the most widely shared and engaged tweets, and sort them into pro/con (or whatever division fits the story.

Then it's analysis. We identify the facts each side is referencing, the affected values and emotions from either side, and whatever the key source of division is (if there is one.

Like any methodology, this has its limitations. It only looks at twitter, for example. If there is an argument or position out there that doesn't come through in the data, then we can't really assume it's there (although we do use broader ideas to contextualize and explain the data).

Thank you for this! One of our biggest challenges is figuring out how best to design the article and content, we're definitely going to play around with the text boxes.

> say something like, "Families who live in the country believe..." instead of "right-wingers believe..."

I love this.

I appreciate that! You're doing the right thing, that's the best path to understanding why people disagree.

Facts without an interpretive framework are incomprehensible, and so it's really important to understand many disagreements as differences in framework.

I don't think this is a problem of fake narratives versus reasonable people. It's that we all use narratives to understand the world, and those narratives often conflict. And if our goal is peace, it's more important to understand these differences than it is to adjudicated between them.

This is particularly true if some of these perspectives are actually pretty worrying. Because if we just write folks off as crazy or brainwashed, we don't really understand them. It's perfectly fine to still think other people are wrong, though.

Thank you! We're trying.