I agree however I’ve seen the other world too I’ve been pretty to both. One dissects the other much like The Daily Show did or used to.
But things can be taken out of context, too.
If it were Bernie and Trump who would swallow their pride and vote for Bernie? If it were Biden and Trump do you think that kids care about Trump being reelected?
I hope so.
Oh, I’m not endorsing one side over the other. I just like to point out that EVERYONE, the youngs included, can end up in a media bubble. And it pays to be generally aware of the numbers to understand where the broader population is.
I agree… By the way I edited that last part it didn’t make any sense.
Look at the UK. Jeremy Corbyn is popular on Twitter and Reddit. Theresa May was despised. In some real life polls for who would be the better PM…Undecided beat the pair of them!
Conservative pundits are perhaps not the best choice to cite about Democratic politics. As in this piece, they cherrypick to find the worst things to say.
In the long run, they may be right - everybody but one person will lose the nomination, after all - but they are saying what their constituents want to hear rather than being objective.
Yeah, this is a generalization, but I haven’t yet found a counter-example.
Man… I can barely read my own posts in this thread. I apologize if people can’t get the gist of what I’m saying. I think I’m good a rereading my posts before I send them, and it turns out to still be a disaster.
It’s a little embarrassing.
The Twitter Electorate Isn’t the Real Electorate
Social media is distorting our sense of mainstream opinion.
A good piece on how Corbyn was set to win a landslide according to Twitter only to lose in the biggest landslide his party has suffered in 90 years when it came to real voting.
Corbyn and his party spent the whole of 2019 demanding a snap election so they certainly believed they could win. And incredibly one of Team Corbyn’s self-reflective analysis is "despite the party’s defeat, the party leader “gained more likes and retweets on 12 December [election day] than UK Labour or Boris Johnson in the entire campaign”.
Everything I’ve been reading lately points to the correctness of Boycott’s point.
Decades ago we all watched Walter Cronkite. We didn’t all read the N.Y. Times, but our local papers often carried top opinions via syndication. Many of us lived in segregated communities, but when the underclass rioted it was on the 7 o’clock news.
Nowadays print media is almost dead. For televised news many turn to shrill voices like Maddow or Hannity. An idiot of any ilk can create his own lying website for a few dollars; even here at SDMB we see links to such sites apparently posted more-or-less in good faith. The predominance of Fake News has led many Americans to act as though all News is Fake. With news habitually slanted, and reporting priorities quite faulty, strikes and protests no longer get fair coverage. Instead, outrage and concern focus on contrived issues.
Lies and propaganda are the new norm. Even commentators on the “correct” side of an issue can turn off potential converts with their exaggerations and excessive “correctness.” The country is divided into the Informed and the Misinformed, with the latter group an ever-growing majority. The Misinformed Majority is ripe for manipulation by Putin, the Koch Brothers and other malicious agents.
Campaign finance reform might help a little, but with the Supreme Court now firmly controlled by the evil-doers we can expect little progress. That Court continues to rule in favor of GOP suppression of voters likely to favor reforms. In America, income inequality is rising. School quality is declining. Politicians with real solutions are laughed at. Many voters focus on guns, guns, guns.
European countries have not yet had their democracies as thoroughly destroyed as that of the U.S., but they’re moving in the same direction. Billionaires hold unprecedented power. As Western values erode, expect the “benevolent dictatorships” of East Asia to become the new model.
How can anyone imagine the outlook isn’t very grim?
I just got done playing the “Totally Unrigged Primary” game that was put out by Samantha Bee’s show, Full Frontal. You sign up for the game and align yourself with a candidate, and answer questions about the primary race every day for points. Since the game started on Oct 31, Andrew Yang has been the frontrunner by about 2 million points over Warren (meaning the people who backed Yang’s collective score is about 2 million more than the Warren supporters’ collective score). Yang only had 19,000-some supporters to Warren’s 22,000-some supporters but either Yang’s supporters were that much better at answering questions, or Warren supporters stopped answering questions as soon as they signed up.
You could make a donation in the game, which would end up going to the winning candidate. So Andrew Yang just got $49k in PAC money from this game, even though he’s polling so low. Warren supporters (me!) are not too excited about that.
FWIW the game shook out like this:
Yang - 13,796,531 pts / 19,934 players
Warren - 11,776,662 pts / 22358 players
Buttigieg - 3,095,340 pts / 8071 players
Sanders - 2,311,927 pts / 6785 players
Klobuchar - 1,164,516 pts / 2132 players
Biden - 535,226 pts / 1744 players
Bloomburg - 142,095 pts / 432 players
Gabbard - 81,339 pts / 472 players
Steyer - 72,096 pts / 245 players
Bennett - 60,445 pts / 125 players
Patrick - 24,487 pts / 97 players
Delaney - 16,637 pts / 51 players
Anyway, I thought it was interesting to see Yang being the random frontrunner the whole time (not Warren or Sanders or Biden). But of course, it’s not random. Apps are where Yang supporters are at.
Social media and narrowcasting has definitely made our bubbles worse and it can greatly amplify or diminish the perceived support of a candidate.
I’ve mentioned that no one in my bubble supports Biden yet he constantly polls strongly. Those polls aren’t fake, they just remind me that my bubble and social circle are very different than those across the USA. I have to remind myself that on a given day, the only people I interact with that don’t have a college degree are the doorman at my apartment building, the maintenance and cleaning staff, Uber drivers, and maybe bartenders or servers. At my last job, there were only a few without degrees and they started running tickets on the floor of the CBOT to learn the financial markets the day after they graduated high school.
Brutal
And of course Biden came back and smashed all the internet favorites in the Super Tuesday primaries because while their supporters could be very loud online they couldn’t bring themselves to actually vote. The real world always wins a contest involving reality.
Ron Paul had a lot of fans online and he had way less votes.
Yeah, I read somewhere recently that Twitter is just terrible for its predictive value. Maybe at 538?
Something like only 20% or a bit less of Twitter accounts represent people instead of causes or corporations and of that 20% less than 10% post more than once per month.
So when you’re hearing a newsie talking about ‘Twitter users say’ or ‘Twitter trends’ what you’re hearing is ‘An unrepresentative sample of less than 2% of Americans believe…’
Using Social Media as any form of marketing/propagandizing is only useful is something gets picked up and shared in more mainstream, broadly viewed media.