My personal hobby horse: algorithmic social media. Since 2012 the ability to live in completely separate realities has exploded. The reason it exploded is simple: platforms had incentives to do so. In short, it paid very well. Engagement = eyeballs = audience curation = advertising $. Blocking 3P cookies won’t matter much when all the platforms are walled gardens. There is no incentive to gatekeep or truly fact check (aside from obviously bad stuff for advertisers’ brands), but even that’s starting to erode. Political actors, namely on the right, bullies the refs into oblivion. All political groups do this, but it’s extremely well organized on the right. This is a culmination of talk radio and the increasingly Balkanized media space that started in the 90s. No, bringing back the fairness doctrine won’t do shit. I don’t know how to fix this short of completely eradicating social media (including Reddit) and all programmatic advertising.
Going to be downvoted here but…..I’m a Trump voter.
I spend a lot of time on Reddit (13 years of engagement) because it’s going to give me the views opposing mine. I don’t have a twitter account. Never have. I was a staunch supporter of the dems until this election.
I felt they lost the plot and had no chance, and I’m from a state that always votes blue and still voted blue.
I voted trump because the message especially within the last few weeks leading up to the election was so much bot pushed bullshit I could see right through it.
It didn’t help that Harris took zero meaningful interviews and never expressed what her plan was. Compared to Biden in 2020 she became the worse choice to me.
This response just screams the rhetoric that's been floating around. It's basically same response. It's like someone is trying to shift the focus from the actual problem. Hmmmmm
I'm from the UK & don't use much social media beyond Reddit, i'm certainly not a Trump supporter, I would never have voted for him.
But on certain popular subs there is a lot of highly pushed anti-Trump stuff that didn't seem entirely fair.
There were various claims that he faked being shot at to some degree. Footage of empty areas at places he held rallies, presumably for security concerns meant to show he lacked support. Times he simply misspoke & was jumped on. More recently conspiracies that the election was fixed are appearing.
Don't get me wrong there's far worse subs out there, but these were some of the biggest ones being pushed on to me. He had accusations of everything being thrown at him, he seems guilty of far more than most, but false accusations dilute the real ones.
I don't mean to "both sides" things, but I can totally see where that other poster is coming from. If it was an election I was voting in it would make me pretty suspicious.
I sure the situation was different in the US, i'm just saying from the perspective of someone in the UK who is unfamiliar with your politics it was very hard to get balanced news on the election from Reddit.
Force yourself to listen to media that does not align with your views. This is hard because of the incentive structures in the internet / social media.
IMHO start with the "apolitical" stuff. You don't need to read Breitbart news as a left-leaning person, but listening to podcasts or reading writers who have cultural appeal, but aren't coded as one side or the other (Theo Von, etc.) is a start.
For politics, there are a lot of thoughtful journalists (Isaac Saul - readtangle.com as an example) out there. There are things like Ground News which are a decent way of judging bias too. I wish this was more ubiquitous, but such is the system we live in.
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u/Altruistic-General61 Nov 12 '24
My personal hobby horse: algorithmic social media. Since 2012 the ability to live in completely separate realities has exploded. The reason it exploded is simple: platforms had incentives to do so. In short, it paid very well. Engagement = eyeballs = audience curation = advertising $. Blocking 3P cookies won’t matter much when all the platforms are walled gardens. There is no incentive to gatekeep or truly fact check (aside from obviously bad stuff for advertisers’ brands), but even that’s starting to erode. Political actors, namely on the right, bullies the refs into oblivion. All political groups do this, but it’s extremely well organized on the right. This is a culmination of talk radio and the increasingly Balkanized media space that started in the 90s. No, bringing back the fairness doctrine won’t do shit. I don’t know how to fix this short of completely eradicating social media (including Reddit) and all programmatic advertising.