6 ms·

Republicans Find a Facebook Workaround: Their Own Apps

19 points by tareqak 8y ago

funkythings 8y ago
"Conservatives “feel like the big social platforms, Facebook and Twitter, are not sympathetic to their views,”. Uhm. yes. But this is not a "feeling". Jack Dorsey and Zuckerberg have both admitted the echo chamber their companies are in. You don't have to be conservative, or even American, to see that Silicon Valley is definitely left leaning, which will be reflected in the content social media giants allow. If this is good or bad is another question. Everyone builds their own echo chamber, consciously or unconsciously. Thats why I don't appreciate the one-sidedness of the article. They make it sound like only republicans like to live in their bubble.
- anisoz 8y ago
  Really, what a joke this part was: >This is the insular world in which tens of thousands of Americans who use conservative political apps are experiencing the midterm election season. Because being on Facebook on Twitter is not experiencing an insular world, right? I mean, conservatives would not have to create their own apps to communicate if they would be left to express their views on the mainstream ones.
  - krapp 8y ago
    >I mean, conservatives would not have to create their own apps to communicate if they would be left to express their views on the mainstream ones. But I see conservative views on social media all the time, they're doing just fine on mainstream platforms. The vast leftist purge of conservatives from social media is mostly propaganda and myth.
    - NickNameNick 8y ago
      I think there must be some powerful mental dissonance for conservatives in a world where by some important measures, you are winning, and still find that "Reality has a well known liberal bias"
      - funkythings 8y ago
        American culture is shaped largely by costal cities, especially towards the outwards world. Don't you think its fair to say those regions have a liberal bias?
        didibus 8y ago
        Societies are more complex then that I believe. At some point, people must wonder why are we working together? We must share somewhat similar desires in what we want as an outcome. That means, we share a similar vision for the environment we want to live in. Is this vision drastically diferent between the American left and the right? I'm not sure. I still feel people are looking for as much personal freedom as possible while maintaining high personal safety. In that regard, if its true this is still the shared outcome by all Americans, then the disagreement is in how to best achieve it. In that case, there will be someone who'se idea is actually better. If coastal cities are the major influences on this end goal, could it not be that their method works better? I'm not wanting to downplay the right. There are most likely specific issues which could be better solved with right leaning policies, this is all really hard to predict. The point I want to make is that not everything can be bias. The center isn't necessarily the unbiased position. Its possible the right or the left is actually the better solution on one issue or another. If say the left was overall a set of better solutions, it would be unfair to say that people who believe in those solutions to be biased, they might be unbiased, yet, the unbiased truth is that the set on the left is simply a better way to achieve the desired outcome. This would similarly apply to the right.
        funkythings 8y ago
        I disagree with "I still feel people are looking for as much personal freedom as possible while maintaining high personal safety". If we're talking about leftists, not (classical) liberals, it is abundantly clear that they don't want personal freedom, but government control
        krapp 8y ago
        The premise that America is locked in a cultural war between leftist "city dwellers" and "heartland" conservatives is also mostly populist propaganda. The truth is most Americans are not entirely one or the other ideologically. But we have a two party first-past-the-post system which encourages ideological polarity and tribalism, so broad and simplistic (and mostly incorrect) narratives about the makeup of American culture and politics win out in the media and get reintegrated into popular culture through osmosis.
  - funkythings 8y ago
    What do you expect from a newspaper that has people on their editorial board like Sara Jeong, who openly tells us all on twitter how she likes to see old white people suffer?
    - anisoz 8y ago
      Very dark times are coming to the US. It's not going to end well. I hope we can avoid it in Europe, we still have time left. I think people here will see what's happening in the US as a warning sign not to let things go too far.
      - anon4738383 8y ago
        Chris Hedges, the reporter who was booed, drowned out and pushed off stage for opposing the Iraq invasion, his latest book America: The Farewell Tour is a must read. America is headed to bread and circuses, violent cognitive dissonance, troglodyte populist fascists and the rich aristocracy strip-mining the foundations of civilization one rust-belt city system and bridge at a time until cities collapse.
      - WalterGR 8y ago
        Sorry, what’s happening in the US? I live there but I must be missing what’s going on.
- spaginal 8y ago
  That was the impression I was getting. They were trying to make the point that these insular platforms are something conservative Republicans are cooking up on their own, but the behavior of the other major social networks attempting to insulate their platforms first and foremost is what is creating these conditions across the board for everyone. Action, reaction. Private platforms, newsgroups, bbses, and forums are nothing new for the internet, I wouldn't even know if I would call these apps social networks in the sense of a wide reach like Twitter and Facebook have, but it shouldn't be surprising that if you deplatform a group of people and/or make their political views against the terms of service, that they'll go somewhere else, and if the other place they go to happens to be an echo chamber of political thought built from the ashes of actions committed by other social networks with a perceived political bent, it shouldn't be surprising that the political activism gets ramped way up as a result. In my opinion, and this goes for both groups, not exposing yourself daily to conflicting opinions and different solutions to problems is intellectually damaging, and I firmly believe how most major social media companies are handling discourse in our country is extremely short sighted and damaging for real problem solving and conversations going forward. The first amendment and free expression is supposed to be an ugly, gnashing, frothy thing full of intellectual guts and blood. Bad ideas and bullshit solutions should get their guts ripped out in spirited debate, and we aren't doing that anymore. From my perspective, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, et al are close minded companies ran by intellectually weak and close minded people with a myopic world view and it's going to fracture things further, not help it.
  - funkythings 8y ago
    We can never reach the point of spirited debate, when any opinion that goes against popular opinion is immediately labelled as "hate speech", "bigoted" or "ignorance". Good point
  - mcphage 8y ago
    > From my perspective, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, et al are close minded companies ran by intellectually weak and close minded people with a myopic world view and it's going to fracture things further, not help it. I get that you don’t like the Democrats, but if you can’t distinguish between the GOP and conspiracy peddlers like Alex Jones, then I think you hate your own party more than the Democrats do.
kleton 8y ago
De-platform Republicans. Republicans find other platforms. What is the surprise here?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- spamizbad 8y ago
  What Republicans are being deplatformed? The only one I could find was a fringe challenger named Paul Nehlen who acts like a Democratic characticure of a “racist Republican”
  - smsm42 8y ago
    Are you literally claiming you tried to find any Republican (I include here obvious conservative people who are not elected officials but would obviously vote Republican and are outspoken in support of causes associated with Republicans) who got deplatformed on social media, and could not locate more than one person? I would suggest to put more effort into it, because there is definitely more than one case.
    - spamizbad 8y ago
      I’m specifically interested in Republican politicians. It looks like he was banned from Twitter due to posting a racist meme (which wasn’t related to Politics or conservative thinking). It looks like he was also banned from Gab for doxxing someone. Can you give an instance where someone was banned for simply having Republican views, rather than someone violating the TOS who merely happens to be Republican?
      - smsm42 8y ago
        In most cases, TOS are super-vague and allow to ban for things like "hateful conduct", without defining what it is. Criticizing anybody could be defined as "hateful conduct", and so is participating in any political controversy - after all, if you say some politician is a bad person and should never be elected, doesn't it mean you hate him? So if you search for "twitter bans conservative", get literally dozens of results, you can always claim they are banned for "violating the TOS", not for expressing their views. And since there's almost never a specification of what caused the ban and no process that allows to know it, and frequently not even any notification beyond "you've been suspended, goodbye" there's no way to resolve this question (e.g. twitter suspended one of my accounts which I used to post completely innocent non-political non-offensive jokes, I still have no idea why and there's no process to find out, I don't care because I stopped using Twitter shortly thereafter anyway). So you can always claim this is because all these people were racist, hateful and doxxing. I have no means to prove otherwise to you, there's no force in the Universe, beyond God Almighty and maybe NSA, that could prove particular twitter account never posted anything bad, especially after it's been blocked. But I can see the pattern. Especially when obvious hateful conduct on twitter (like a notorious antisemite Farrakhan) keep using Twitter for spreading their hate without any problems.
SN76477 8y ago
Social media needs to be more fragmented so this is good. Too bad it is politicized though.
raincom 8y ago
Just replace 'Republicans' and 'Facebook' with X and Y. Then, everything goes away: X finds a Y-workaround. This is an issue of problem solving in any domain.
spamizbad 8y ago
This is ironic given how adroit the current Republican president has been at harnessing twitter. Are they sure they want to leave?
- smsm42 8y ago
  Why is it ironic? These people surely don't have a problem with getting the Trump's message in. And to read Trump's tweets, they don't even need Twitter account. What they have the problem with is getting their own messages out, getting their own communications. Trump has nothing to do with it - his message is not the problem, he has the biggest megaphone in the world, anything he wants to be heard will be heard regardless of platform.
didibus 8y ago
There was a recent study that demonstrated that social media (Facebook) was actually pushing people to be more right leaning over time. I wonder if moving away from the platform would revert that trend.
- krapp 8y ago
  not if they're moving to platforms whose explicit purpose is to curate right-wing views.
  - didibus 8y ago
    But these platforms would be echo chambers, and their messaging wouldn't reach people outside of it. That's effectively what it used to be like with online forum communities and news outlets, you'd only go there if you were already won over.
    - krapp 8y ago
      You're correct, and that seems to be the point. They consider the entire rest of media (mainstream and social) to be a leftist echo chamber and these apps to be the only place where they can discuss what they consider to be truth without "bias" or "interference". It's the same elevator pitch as Fox News but with a modern twist.
rdiddly 8y ago
They lost me at the first line. "Imagine a society in which everyone more or less agrees with you." Don't have to imagine. Maybe this author's been under a rock and hasn't heard the phrase "echo chamber." The other thing of course is that it's not just Republicans surrounded by only those they agree with. By the simple rules of logic if you start out with A and B together, and B leaves, then A is just as insular and surrounded-by-its-own-kind as B is. People on both sides need to get better at understanding the opposing viewpoint. Plus having a coherent viewpoint of your own, and then the humility to know you don't have a direct line to The Truth.
- happytoexplain 8y ago
  Your logic seems overly simplistic. A's makeup and ideologies aren't necessarily as uniform as B's, unless you're implicitly asserting that they are - but it would be more constructive to make such a point explicitly.
  - rdiddly 8y ago
    A's belief that their ideology is broad and that B's is narrow and uniform, is in fact part of what defines A's rhetoric and its viewpoint of itself and of B. But the fact remains that A's tolerance for B is no higher than B's tolerance for A. A freaks out just as theatrically when it loses an election as B does when it does. Each one is starting to define itself as not the other one. A = !B and B = !A. Neither has a coherent ideology anymore. You are voting for nothing. The differences are now chiefly historical, between the ideologies each sold out and neither implements.
- smsm42 8y ago
  > The other thing of course is that it's not just Republicans surrounded by only those they agree with "Not just"? Let's do a thought experiment. Take two people, and let them come to a random Silicon Valley Company - Twitter, Facebook, Google, whatever, or to a college campus - and publish on a company public forum, or campus forum, etc. - a slightly controversial article - one with some left-to-the-center bent and one with right-of-the-center one. Which person would have a higher chance to earn the vitriolic scorn of the surrounding public, face HR complaints and ultimately may get fired? Did you ever read the political spectrum distribution on university faculties? In some places, there's no single person that is not ideologically left on the whole faculty staff. In others, you get ratios like 1:10 to 1:20. This is where the students spend their formative years. I am assuming for now that the political spectrum is one-dimensional, which is obviously wrong. But if we keep this simplifying assumption for a minute, and consider how one can form a bubble, "not just Republicans" would be quite an understatement. For the non-lefty person in most tech, academic, entertainment, press and many other areas, there would be literally no way to live in a Republican bubble - there would be no material to form the bubble from. Of course, there are such bubbles too, and places where you could comfortably form them - but I think I would not be too wrong if I say at least 90% of HN readers are not in those places. You can form your own bubble of course by carefully selecting what you read, who you listen to, etc. - but even then if you're in one of the places enumerated above in the US, you'd encounter people who hold views different from yours - and are very open, outspoken and sometimes forceful about them - literally every day. The reason why the right wants their own apps is not because they don't want to ever hear from the left - though some do, of course, but not all - it's because they feel the left does not want to hear from them, and is actively pursuing silencing them. And they have a very good evidence to show for it.
rmbeard 8y ago
soon everyone will have a personal app and there will be no room on my phone, I will have to start getting rid of my friends.

19 points by tareqak 8y ago

"Conservatives “feel like the big social platforms, Facebook and Twitter, are not sympathetic to their views,”. Uhm. yes. But this is not a "feeling". Jack Dorsey and Zuckerberg have both admitted the echo chamber their companies are in. You don't have to be conservative, or even American, to see that Silicon Valley is definitely left leaning, which will be reflected in the content social media giants allow. If this is good or bad is another question. Everyone builds their own echo chamber, consciously or unconsciously. Thats why I don't appreciate the one-sidedness of the article. They make it sound like only republicans like to live in their bubble.

anisoz 8y ago
Really, what a joke this part was: >This is the insular world in which tens of thousands of Americans who use conservative political apps are experiencing the midterm election season. Because being on Facebook on Twitter is not experiencing an insular world, right? I mean, conservatives would not have to create their own apps to communicate if they would be left to express their views on the mainstream ones.
- krapp 8y ago
  >I mean, conservatives would not have to create their own apps to communicate if they would be left to express their views on the mainstream ones. But I see conservative views on social media all the time, they're doing just fine on mainstream platforms. The vast leftist purge of conservatives from social media is mostly propaganda and myth.
  - NickNameNick 8y ago
    I think there must be some powerful mental dissonance for conservatives in a world where by some important measures, you are winning, and still find that "Reality has a well known liberal bias"
    - funkythings 8y ago
      American culture is shaped largely by costal cities, especially towards the outwards world. Don't you think its fair to say those regions have a liberal bias?
      - didibus 8y ago
        Societies are more complex then that I believe. At some point, people must wonder why are we working together? We must share somewhat similar desires in what we want as an outcome. That means, we share a similar vision for the environment we want to live in. Is this vision drastically diferent between the American left and the right? I'm not sure. I still feel people are looking for as much personal freedom as possible while maintaining high personal safety. In that regard, if its true this is still the shared outcome by all Americans, then the disagreement is in how to best achieve it. In that case, there will be someone who'se idea is actually better. If coastal cities are the major influences on this end goal, could it not be that their method works better? I'm not wanting to downplay the right. There are most likely specific issues which could be better solved with right leaning policies, this is all really hard to predict. The point I want to make is that not everything can be bias. The center isn't necessarily the unbiased position. Its possible the right or the left is actually the better solution on one issue or another. If say the left was overall a set of better solutions, it would be unfair to say that people who believe in those solutions to be biased, they might be unbiased, yet, the unbiased truth is that the set on the left is simply a better way to achieve the desired outcome. This would similarly apply to the right.
        funkythings 8y ago
        I disagree with "I still feel people are looking for as much personal freedom as possible while maintaining high personal safety". If we're talking about leftists, not (classical) liberals, it is abundantly clear that they don't want personal freedom, but government control
      - krapp 8y ago
        The premise that America is locked in a cultural war between leftist "city dwellers" and "heartland" conservatives is also mostly populist propaganda. The truth is most Americans are not entirely one or the other ideologically. But we have a two party first-past-the-post system which encourages ideological polarity and tribalism, so broad and simplistic (and mostly incorrect) narratives about the makeup of American culture and politics win out in the media and get reintegrated into popular culture through osmosis.
- funkythings 8y ago
  What do you expect from a newspaper that has people on their editorial board like Sara Jeong, who openly tells us all on twitter how she likes to see old white people suffer?
  - anisoz 8y ago
    Very dark times are coming to the US. It's not going to end well. I hope we can avoid it in Europe, we still have time left. I think people here will see what's happening in the US as a warning sign not to let things go too far.
    - anon4738383 8y ago
      Chris Hedges, the reporter who was booed, drowned out and pushed off stage for opposing the Iraq invasion, his latest book America: The Farewell Tour is a must read. America is headed to bread and circuses, violent cognitive dissonance, troglodyte populist fascists and the rich aristocracy strip-mining the foundations of civilization one rust-belt city system and bridge at a time until cities collapse.
    - WalterGR 8y ago
      Sorry, what’s happening in the US? I live there but I must be missing what’s going on.
spaginal 8y ago
That was the impression I was getting. They were trying to make the point that these insular platforms are something conservative Republicans are cooking up on their own, but the behavior of the other major social networks attempting to insulate their platforms first and foremost is what is creating these conditions across the board for everyone. Action, reaction. Private platforms, newsgroups, bbses, and forums are nothing new for the internet, I wouldn't even know if I would call these apps social networks in the sense of a wide reach like Twitter and Facebook have, but it shouldn't be surprising that if you deplatform a group of people and/or make their political views against the terms of service, that they'll go somewhere else, and if the other place they go to happens to be an echo chamber of political thought built from the ashes of actions committed by other social networks with a perceived political bent, it shouldn't be surprising that the political activism gets ramped way up as a result. In my opinion, and this goes for both groups, not exposing yourself daily to conflicting opinions and different solutions to problems is intellectually damaging, and I firmly believe how most major social media companies are handling discourse in our country is extremely short sighted and damaging for real problem solving and conversations going forward. The first amendment and free expression is supposed to be an ugly, gnashing, frothy thing full of intellectual guts and blood. Bad ideas and bullshit solutions should get their guts ripped out in spirited debate, and we aren't doing that anymore. From my perspective, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, et al are close minded companies ran by intellectually weak and close minded people with a myopic world view and it's going to fracture things further, not help it.
- funkythings 8y ago
  We can never reach the point of spirited debate, when any opinion that goes against popular opinion is immediately labelled as "hate speech", "bigoted" or "ignorance". Good point
- mcphage 8y ago
  > From my perspective, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, et al are close minded companies ran by intellectually weak and close minded people with a myopic world view and it's going to fracture things further, not help it. I get that you don’t like the Democrats, but if you can’t distinguish between the GOP and conspiracy peddlers like Alex Jones, then I think you hate your own party more than the Democrats do.

kleton 8y ago

De-platform Republicans. Republicans find other platforms. What is the surprise here?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
spamizbad 8y ago
What Republicans are being deplatformed? The only one I could find was a fringe challenger named Paul Nehlen who acts like a Democratic characticure of a “racist Republican”
- smsm42 8y ago
  Are you literally claiming you tried to find any Republican (I include here obvious conservative people who are not elected officials but would obviously vote Republican and are outspoken in support of causes associated with Republicans) who got deplatformed on social media, and could not locate more than one person? I would suggest to put more effort into it, because there is definitely more than one case.
  - spamizbad 8y ago
    I’m specifically interested in Republican politicians. It looks like he was banned from Twitter due to posting a racist meme (which wasn’t related to Politics or conservative thinking). It looks like he was also banned from Gab for doxxing someone. Can you give an instance where someone was banned for simply having Republican views, rather than someone violating the TOS who merely happens to be Republican?
    - smsm42 8y ago
      In most cases, TOS are super-vague and allow to ban for things like "hateful conduct", without defining what it is. Criticizing anybody could be defined as "hateful conduct", and so is participating in any political controversy - after all, if you say some politician is a bad person and should never be elected, doesn't it mean you hate him? So if you search for "twitter bans conservative", get literally dozens of results, you can always claim they are banned for "violating the TOS", not for expressing their views. And since there's almost never a specification of what caused the ban and no process that allows to know it, and frequently not even any notification beyond "you've been suspended, goodbye" there's no way to resolve this question (e.g. twitter suspended one of my accounts which I used to post completely innocent non-political non-offensive jokes, I still have no idea why and there's no process to find out, I don't care because I stopped using Twitter shortly thereafter anyway). So you can always claim this is because all these people were racist, hateful and doxxing. I have no means to prove otherwise to you, there's no force in the Universe, beyond God Almighty and maybe NSA, that could prove particular twitter account never posted anything bad, especially after it's been blocked. But I can see the pattern. Especially when obvious hateful conduct on twitter (like a notorious antisemite Farrakhan) keep using Twitter for spreading their hate without any problems.

SN76477 8y ago

Social media needs to be more fragmented so this is good. Too bad it is politicized though.

raincom 8y ago

Just replace 'Republicans' and 'Facebook' with X and Y. Then, everything goes away: X finds a Y-workaround. This is an issue of problem solving in any domain.

spamizbad 8y ago

This is ironic given how adroit the current Republican president has been at harnessing twitter. Are they sure they want to leave?

smsm42 8y ago
Why is it ironic? These people surely don't have a problem with getting the Trump's message in. And to read Trump's tweets, they don't even need Twitter account. What they have the problem with is getting their own messages out, getting their own communications. Trump has nothing to do with it - his message is not the problem, he has the biggest megaphone in the world, anything he wants to be heard will be heard regardless of platform.

didibus 8y ago

There was a recent study that demonstrated that social media (Facebook) was actually pushing people to be more right leaning over time. I wonder if moving away from the platform would revert that trend.

krapp 8y ago
not if they're moving to platforms whose explicit purpose is to curate right-wing views.
- didibus 8y ago
  But these platforms would be echo chambers, and their messaging wouldn't reach people outside of it. That's effectively what it used to be like with online forum communities and news outlets, you'd only go there if you were already won over.
  - krapp 8y ago
    You're correct, and that seems to be the point. They consider the entire rest of media (mainstream and social) to be a leftist echo chamber and these apps to be the only place where they can discuss what they consider to be truth without "bias" or "interference". It's the same elevator pitch as Fox News but with a modern twist.

rdiddly 8y ago

They lost me at the first line. "Imagine a society in which everyone more or less agrees with you." Don't have to imagine. Maybe this author's been under a rock and hasn't heard the phrase "echo chamber." The other thing of course is that it's not just Republicans surrounded by only those they agree with. By the simple rules of logic if you start out with A and B together, and B leaves, then A is just as insular and surrounded-by-its-own-kind as B is. People on both sides need to get better at understanding the opposing viewpoint. Plus having a coherent viewpoint of your own, and then the humility to know you don't have a direct line to The Truth.

happytoexplain 8y ago
Your logic seems overly simplistic. A's makeup and ideologies aren't necessarily as uniform as B's, unless you're implicitly asserting that they are - but it would be more constructive to make such a point explicitly.
- rdiddly 8y ago
  A's belief that their ideology is broad and that B's is narrow and uniform, is in fact part of what defines A's rhetoric and its viewpoint of itself and of B. But the fact remains that A's tolerance for B is no higher than B's tolerance for A. A freaks out just as theatrically when it loses an election as B does when it does. Each one is starting to define itself as not the other one. A = !B and B = !A. Neither has a coherent ideology anymore. You are voting for nothing. The differences are now chiefly historical, between the ideologies each sold out and neither implements.
smsm42 8y ago
> The other thing of course is that it's not just Republicans surrounded by only those they agree with "Not just"? Let's do a thought experiment. Take two people, and let them come to a random Silicon Valley Company - Twitter, Facebook, Google, whatever, or to a college campus - and publish on a company public forum, or campus forum, etc. - a slightly controversial article - one with some left-to-the-center bent and one with right-of-the-center one. Which person would have a higher chance to earn the vitriolic scorn of the surrounding public, face HR complaints and ultimately may get fired? Did you ever read the political spectrum distribution on university faculties? In some places, there's no single person that is not ideologically left on the whole faculty staff. In others, you get ratios like 1:10 to 1:20. This is where the students spend their formative years. I am assuming for now that the political spectrum is one-dimensional, which is obviously wrong. But if we keep this simplifying assumption for a minute, and consider how one can form a bubble, "not just Republicans" would be quite an understatement. For the non-lefty person in most tech, academic, entertainment, press and many other areas, there would be literally no way to live in a Republican bubble - there would be no material to form the bubble from. Of course, there are such bubbles too, and places where you could comfortably form them - but I think I would not be too wrong if I say at least 90% of HN readers are not in those places. You can form your own bubble of course by carefully selecting what you read, who you listen to, etc. - but even then if you're in one of the places enumerated above in the US, you'd encounter people who hold views different from yours - and are very open, outspoken and sometimes forceful about them - literally every day. The reason why the right wants their own apps is not because they don't want to ever hear from the left - though some do, of course, but not all - it's because they feel the left does not want to hear from them, and is actively pursuing silencing them. And they have a very good evidence to show for it.

rmbeard 8y ago

soon everyone will have a personal app and there will be no room on my phone, I will have to start getting rid of my friends.