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![[Post New]](/s/i/i.gif) 2018/03/01 14:50:09
Subject: Re:Social media and internet not cause of political polarisation
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Pragmatic Primus Commanding Cult Forces
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NinthMusketeer wrote:Well Reagan was 1981-1989 (but more specifically one could say the parties were reasonably non-polarized in crafting the 1986 tax reform) and the internet launched in 1991, so the rise of US political polarization and the rise of the internet did coincide more than not. Granted this could be coincidental, correlation rather than causation, but I wouldn't dismiss the internet as a significant contributor either. I would go into more detail, but that would probably take this in an off-topic direction.
I agree with you.
I'm also going to give only so much weight to a single study that attempts to quantify something that's inherently difficult to quantify.
The Internet's effect on news organizations is also a key part of the puzzle here, IMO.
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![[Post New]](/s/i/i.gif) 2018/03/01 20:55:10
Subject: Social media and internet not cause of political polarisation
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Hangin' with Gork & Mork
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Any polarization in discourse is most likely Frazzled's fault. He waits in the shadows to sow dissent and chaos among the humans.
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Amidst the mists and coldest frosts he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.
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![[Post New]](/s/i/i.gif) 2018/03/01 23:22:40
Subject: Social media and internet not cause of political polarisation
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Longtime Dakkanaut
Building a blood in water scent
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Ahtman wrote:Any polarization in discourse is most likely Frazzled's fault. He waits in the shadows to sow dissent and chaos among the humans.
Artist's impression of the chaos and dissent being sown:
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We were once so close to heaven, St. Peter came out and gave us medals; declaring us "The nicest of the damned".
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” |
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![[Post New]](/s/i/i.gif) 2018/03/02 00:50:19
Subject: Social media and internet not cause of political polarisation
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Humming Great Unclean One of Nurgle
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I believe it.
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Road to Renown! It's like classic Path to Glory, but repaired, remastered, expanded! https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/778170.page
I chose an avatar I feel best represents the quality of my post history.
I try to view Warhammer as more of a toolbox with examples than fully complete games. |
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![[Post New]](/s/i/i.gif) 2018/03/02 05:02:13
Subject: Social media and internet not cause of political polarisation
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Grim Dark Angels Interrogator-Chaplain
Vigo. Spain.
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Hell why shouldn't I believe it, is not like feeder has more bias than the BBC.
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This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/03/02 05:02:26
Crimson Devil wrote:
Dakka does have White Knights and is also rather infamous for it's Black Knights. A new edition brings out the passionate and not all of them are good at expressing themselves in written form. There have been plenty of hysterical responses from both sides so far. So we descend into pointless bickering with neither side listening to each other. So posting here becomes more masturbation than conversation.
ERJAK wrote:Forcing a 40k player to keep playing 7th is basically a hate crime.
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![[Post New]](/s/i/i.gif) 2018/03/02 06:16:04
Subject: Social media and internet not cause of political polarisation
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The Dread Evil Lord Varlak
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nou wrote:This reads as "both CNN and NYT are not biased because" and then two different reasons why those titles should not be treated as biased. If you wanted to express what both you and I wrote in our last posts about NYT type of bias you failed to write it clearly enough... But since you have now expanded on this matter, you and I are on exactly same page on what exact type of skew NYT produces.
That quote is a good pick up, and shows I haven't been entirely clear here. I used bias there in terms of left/right bias, elsewhere I've used it to mean any kind of bias/point of view. I used it differently that time because we were discussing that graphic that broke orgs down on their left/right bias and people were questioning whether some orgs should be that close to the centre. However, given I'd emphasized the other meaning of bias through most of my other posts in the thread, it was weak usage on my part.
Anyway my mistake.
You seem so focused on your point of view here, that you can no longer discern when I agree with you; when I agree with you but have something to add; or when I'm in opposition to you
I think a lot has been lost in the back and forth. I'm happy to accept blame for a lot of that, I haven't been in good form in this thread.
Luciferian never did defend InfoWars or Alex Jones informational value.
He did, though. "Unfortunately, even the most reputable news sources are doing the same thing that Alex Jones is, just to a less conspicuous degree." He wasn't defending Alex Jones so much as claiming all media was as deceptive as Alex Jones, but the result is the same.
Later on he did walk that back a little bit, but the fact he thought that was a reasonable claim even for a little while tells you something about the scope of the 'all media is biased' problem.
I think I found a simpler way to characterise difference in our positions, a kind of "glass half full vs half empty" situation. You seem to believe, that most competent meda titles have their truthfull-to-missinforming ratio in orders of 90:10 and that those 10% of misinformation is mostly mistakes and human/process flaws whlie the least reliable media titles have a ratio of 0% facts/100% BS. Luciferian places the bottom line of closer to 1/99 facts-vs-BS while I know that even the most reliable media titles nowadays have truth-to-missinformation ratios closer to 50/50 if you count their entire spectrum of coverage. They may go near 90:10 ratio only in a single, most specialised area if their funding is independent from said area, which pretty much never occurs in mainstream, politically backed/oriented media. Local or technical newspapers are statistically more reliable on their coverage than large, "all-in-one" nationwide titles and there exist particular journalists that can have a near 100% reliable coverage (and number of said journalist decline in recent decades), but that's it.
Not quite. I'd say my central idea is there is such a thing as a reality based community. This community isn't always right, there is disgreement within this community based on lots of things, and there's plenty of scope for difference based on bias/points of view. And within that community there will be factual errors, though I'd say assigning a percentage to this is arbitrary and fairly meaningless.
The point is that community and how it operates differs wildly to the people who operate outside it. Alex Jones has been used as an example, but there's plenty of others, both media figures and political activists. These are people for whom facts don't matter so much, people who can be caught repeatedly in lies without any penalty, because the audience coming to them doesn't much care about facts, it cares about being given a version of reality it wants to hear.
The line where one community ends and the liars take over isn't a clean line, especially not on an organisational level (FOX News for instance, has some really good actual news reporting, it also has opinion sections with people like Tucker Carlson). But what is important is to recognise that these are very different places, which operate on very different rules. Pretending there is no distinction is something a lot of people do, precisely so they can pretend they're getting just as good a quality information by tuning in to the liars.
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“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something. |
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![[Post New]](/s/i/i.gif) 2018/03/02 13:59:44
Subject: Social media and internet not cause of political polarisation
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5th God of Chaos! (Yea'rly!)
The Great State of Texas
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Ahtman wrote:Any polarization in discourse is most likely Frazzled's fault. He waits in the shadows to sow dissent and chaos among the humans.
Like a giant fat Weiner Dog Boss!
We all float down here.
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-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
-"Don't mind Frazzled. He's just Dakka's crazy old dude locked in the attic. He's harmless. Mostly."
-TBone the Magnificent 1999-2014, Long Live the King!
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![[Post New]](/s/i/i.gif) 2018/03/02 14:26:29
Subject: Social media and internet not cause of political polarisation
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Wicked Warp Spider
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sebster wrote:nou wrote:This reads as "both CNN and NYT are not biased because" and then two different reasons why those titles should not be treated as biased. If you wanted to express what both you and I wrote in our last posts about NYT type of bias you failed to write it clearly enough... But since you have now expanded on this matter, you and I are on exactly same page on what exact type of skew NYT produces.
That quote is a good pick up, and shows I haven't been entirely clear here. I used bias there in terms of left/right bias, elsewhere I've used it to mean any kind of bias/point of view. I used it differently that time because we were discussing that graphic that broke orgs down on their left/right bias and people were questioning whether some orgs should be that close to the centre. However, given I'd emphasized the other meaning of bias through most of my other posts in the thread, it was weak usage on my part.
Anyway my mistake.
You seem so focused on your point of view here, that you can no longer discern when I agree with you; when I agree with you but have something to add; or when I'm in opposition to you
I think a lot has been lost in the back and forth. I'm happy to accept blame for a lot of that, I haven't been in good form in this thread.
Luciferian never did defend InfoWars or Alex Jones informational value.
He did, though. "Unfortunately, even the most reputable news sources are doing the same thing that Alex Jones is, just to a less conspicuous degree." He wasn't defending Alex Jones so much as claiming all media was as deceptive as Alex Jones, but the result is the same.
Later on he did walk that back a little bit, but the fact he thought that was a reasonable claim even for a little while tells you something about the scope of the 'all media is biased' problem.
I think I found a simpler way to characterise difference in our positions, a kind of "glass half full vs half empty" situation. You seem to believe, that most competent meda titles have their truthfull-to-missinforming ratio in orders of 90:10 and that those 10% of misinformation is mostly mistakes and human/process flaws whlie the least reliable media titles have a ratio of 0% facts/100% BS. Luciferian places the bottom line of closer to 1/99 facts-vs-BS while I know that even the most reliable media titles nowadays have truth-to-missinformation ratios closer to 50/50 if you count their entire spectrum of coverage. They may go near 90:10 ratio only in a single, most specialised area if their funding is independent from said area, which pretty much never occurs in mainstream, politically backed/oriented media. Local or technical newspapers are statistically more reliable on their coverage than large, "all-in-one" nationwide titles and there exist particular journalists that can have a near 100% reliable coverage (and number of said journalist decline in recent decades), but that's it.
Not quite. I'd say my central idea is there is such a thing as a reality based community. This community isn't always right, there is disgreement within this community based on lots of things, and there's plenty of scope for difference based on bias/points of view. And within that community there will be factual errors, though I'd say assigning a percentage to this is arbitrary and fairly meaningless.
The point is that community and how it operates differs wildly to the people who operate outside it. Alex Jones has been used as an example, but there's plenty of others, both media figures and political activists. These are people for whom facts don't matter so much, people who can be caught repeatedly in lies without any penalty, because the audience coming to them doesn't much care about facts, it cares about being given a version of reality it wants to hear.
The line where one community ends and the liars take over isn't a clean line, especially not on an organisational level (FOX News for instance, has some really good actual news reporting, it also has opinion sections with people like Tucker Carlson). But what is important is to recognise that these are very different places, which operate on very different rules. Pretending there is no distinction is something a lot of people do, precisely so they can pretend they're getting just as good a quality information by tuning in to the liars.
I'm to be blamed as well, as initially I wasn't really intending to get so involved in this thread, so my first post was rather brief and when I finally decided to go full throttle trenches were already set and Alex Jones was already on the table... I probably should have started with something along the lines of my last post and refine from that, as I'm focused solely on central circle or wide audience media - there is enough disinformation there alone to write dissertations. I must also add, that english is not my native language, and while I feel I'm fluent enough, some things still get lost in translation and this goes both ways - understanding and being understood.
I really do feel that I understand your POV on what you now call "real based community" from the start, what I'm trying to show is that this view is somewhat overly optimistic. Earlier in this thread, NinthMusketeer suggested a "good rule of thumb is when a news organization stops publishing retractions or corrections of false claims, it's crossed from normal bias/mistakes into willful deception.". This is unfortunately untrue, as making a manipulated cover story and then publishing a retraction/correction later on in much less exposed way is quite common way of manipulation by itself. In times of continuous publishng media like internet, it sometimes even takes a quite grotesque form of changing leads and titles of articles on hour-to-hour basis, after enough audience have been already presented with misleading article (which is perfectly measurable in the online media) or presenting retractions/corrections/apologies in places so obscure, that they hardly reach any audience at all. It was exactly one of such cases which snowballed into current Polish-Israeli crisis - some time ago there was a defamation court case of mr.Tendera vs ZDF (the whole thing started in 2013 with court cases lasting through 2015-2017). ZDF lost the case couple of times already in different polish and german courts, but as an execution of court order, they presented their apologies as a highly enigmatic link in a footnote section of their site. This in turn jump-started two Europe-wide defamation campaigns, another court verdict against ZDF (which still have not been met) and sped up the legislation of the current anti-defamation law in Poland. And ZDF is most certainly the center circle media in equivalent Germany chart.
Couple of further methods of misinformation are only measurable by meta-analisys. You might be surprised how widespread and effective manipulation by ommision is, or how overrepresentation/underrepresentation (perfecty measurable value of time/volume split) of facts (not even opinions) can bias the typical reader's reception of any given media, while leaving an impression of being "ballanced or just slightly biased" in the eyes of those readers.
If I may propose a classic read for you - "A short history of disinformation" by Vladimir Volkoff. Presented therein are all kinds of "white" disinformation techniques still utilised by mainstream media. Many of such techniques are designed specifically to be court-proof so no retractions/corrections are ever even needed. Many of those reach as far back as XIX century Czar Russia and were refined over the last century (especially during the Cold War era, but internet made them even more prevalent). This is pretty much a field of knowledge, science and craft like any other and have been a subject of progress exactly as any other.
We have covered this in one way over NYT/BBC type of bias subthread, but just as a food for thought: imagine two interviews, one where interviewer is absolutely professional and gives only "transparent" questions but interviewee is totally biased; the second one, where interviewer pushes his clear agenda and interviewee is not skilled enough to avoid being manipulated or even if he is, the resulting interview is further presented in a way, that "compensates" for that skill in "white disinformation" ways. Both interviews are then published and their measurable reception by the audience gives exactly same resulting view on the matter in question. Which media is then to be treated as more objective - the one which manipulated by intentionally choosing to publish a biased POV but otherwise having their hands clear or the one actively manipulating the content of the interview? Typical, day-to-day common reader cannot really resolve this question in a definite way, meta-analysis tools can.
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