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This is pure conjecture but... Liberals in general could be considered the progressives while conservatives are traditionalists. So conservatives are trying to

by gph 11y ago

This is pure conjecture but... Liberals in general could be considered the progressives while conservatives are traditionalists. So conservatives are trying to hold onto the old ways (or at least a perversion of them), whereas liberals are looking for reasons why the old ways are wrong and we need to progress. So conservatives love reading articles that glorify old traditions/ideals, while liberals read the same article in order to confirm all that's wrong with the old ways therefore giving support to their belief that we need a new way to progress forward. Just my initial speculation, take with a large grain of salt.

mfoy_ 11y ago
I like this idea as another possible interpretation of that data point. Essentially you're saying that it's because everyone's clicking the more conservative links which causes the skew, albeit for different reasons. The only point I'm trying to make is that the simple sounding sentence "we estimate the factor decrease in the likelihood that an individual clicks on a cross-cutting article relative to the proportion available in News Feed to be 17% for conservatives and 6% for liberals" really let's you draw your own conclusions.
- V-2 11y ago
  Note that the paper observes: "liberals tend to be connected to fewer friends who share information from the other side, compared to their conservative counterparts: 24% of the hard content shared by liberals’ friends are cross-cutting, compared to 35% for conservatives" The more articles that I can't agree with I find in my feed, the less likely I am to click on one of them than a guy who sees them less often. Even if we both read exactly 3 such articles a week.
asgard1024 11y ago
I have another conjecture. I think liberals are people who have a very inclusive ingroup, potentially including everybody on Earth; while conservatives have a smaller or better defined ingroup (e.g. Americans). From this follows that there is only one type of liberals, but many types of conservatives (depending on their ingroup). So the view of liberals and conservatives to the others is different, because conservatives tend to perceive liberals as just another group that has them as outgroup, which is confusing to liberals. I think in fact it's similar with religion. Atheism is often understood by religious people as another form of religion, but it isn't in fact, it has a unique position among all the types of religious belief; like liberalism is just an edge case of all possible conservativisms.

by gph 11y ago

mfoy_ 11y ago

I like this idea as another possible interpretation of that data point. Essentially you're saying that it's because everyone's clicking the more conservative links which causes the skew, albeit for different reasons. The only point I'm trying to make is that the simple sounding sentence "we estimate the factor decrease in the likelihood that an individual clicks on a cross-cutting article relative to the proportion available in News Feed to be 17% for conservatives and 6% for liberals" really let's you draw your own conclusions.

V-2 11y ago
Note that the paper observes: "liberals tend to be connected to fewer friends who share information from the other side, compared to their conservative counterparts: 24% of the hard content shared by liberals’ friends are cross-cutting, compared to 35% for conservatives" The more articles that I can't agree with I find in my feed, the less likely I am to click on one of them than a guy who sees them less often. Even if we both read exactly 3 such articles a week.

asgard1024 11y ago

I have another conjecture. I think liberals are people who have a very inclusive ingroup, potentially including everybody on Earth; while conservatives have a smaller or better defined ingroup (e.g. Americans). From this follows that there is only one type of liberals, but many types of conservatives (depending on their ingroup). So the view of liberals and conservatives to the others is different, because conservatives tend to perceive liberals as just another group that has them as outgroup, which is confusing to liberals. I think in fact it's similar with religion. Atheism is often understood by religious people as another form of religion, but it isn't in fact, it has a unique position among all the types of religious belief; like liberalism is just an edge case of all possible conservativisms.