5 ms·

The division they have helped foment in the US is pretty impressive.

by creddit 6y ago

dimitrios1 6y ago
People have been this divided for a long time. Social Media just helps exhume it better. Started in the 50s.
- spanhandler 6y ago
  How do you figure the '50s? Times we've been more united than we are right now seem more the exception than the norm, to me, since the founding of the country. Hell we haven't even had an elected member of the Federal government kill or attempt to kill someone over a political dispute in a while.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  Idk, the particular flavor of outrage varies greatly depending on the platform. 4chan, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, all of the them are drastically different platforms with cultures that emergently form from early design decisions like anonymity, One-to-many vs many-to-many communication paradigms, thread layouts, and moderation decisions.
- mbesto 6y ago
  My sense is that lots of divided people (mainly fringe) have basically been silenced for years. Twitter has made it possible for those people to have a voice and more problematic made it super easy for malicious actors to mimic those people's ideas to make the situation worse than it really is. My (probably unpopular) opinion is that they simply shouldn't have a voice. Twitter is bad for society period.
  - drngdds 6y ago
    I feel similarly. Liberal ideals would say that everyone having a global voice is a good thing, but we haven't really seen things play out that way since social media became so dominant. At least not in the US. Though it doesn't help, of course, that TwitFaceTube are designed to maximize engagement at the expense of everything else, which encourages inflammatory content. Maybe if they didn't, we wouldn't have this problem.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hyperbovine 6y ago
If your system of government is not robust to 280-character text messages ... perhaps the problem is not the messages.
- rsa25519 6y ago
  I think this misses the point. The division isn't within the government; it's between individuals. And I don't think the power of short messages is specific to the United States
- creddit 6y ago
  Where did I talk about the government?
kdtsh 6y ago
If division can be fomented by giving everyone a megaphone, then the people were already divided, they just didn't know it. I don't agree with all of Twitter's moderation, but this is a symptom, not the disease.

The division they have helped foment in the US is pretty impressive.

dimitrios1 6y ago

People have been this divided for a long time. Social Media just helps exhume it better. Started in the 50s.

spanhandler 6y ago
How do you figure the '50s? Times we've been more united than we are right now seem more the exception than the norm, to me, since the founding of the country. Hell we haven't even had an elected member of the Federal government kill or attempt to kill someone over a political dispute in a while.
TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
Idk, the particular flavor of outrage varies greatly depending on the platform. 4chan, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, all of the them are drastically different platforms with cultures that emergently form from early design decisions like anonymity, One-to-many vs many-to-many communication paradigms, thread layouts, and moderation decisions.
mbesto 6y ago
My sense is that lots of divided people (mainly fringe) have basically been silenced for years. Twitter has made it possible for those people to have a voice and more problematic made it super easy for malicious actors to mimic those people's ideas to make the situation worse than it really is. My (probably unpopular) opinion is that they simply shouldn't have a voice. Twitter is bad for society period.
- drngdds 6y ago
  I feel similarly. Liberal ideals would say that everyone having a global voice is a good thing, but we haven't really seen things play out that way since social media became so dominant. At least not in the US. Though it doesn't help, of course, that TwitFaceTube are designed to maximize engagement at the expense of everything else, which encourages inflammatory content. Maybe if they didn't, we wouldn't have this problem.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hyperbovine 6y ago

If your system of government is not robust to 280-character text messages ... perhaps the problem is not the messages.

rsa25519 6y ago
I think this misses the point. The division isn't within the government; it's between individuals. And I don't think the power of short messages is specific to the United States
creddit 6y ago
Where did I talk about the government?

kdtsh 6y ago

If division can be fomented by giving everyone a megaphone, then the people were already divided, they just didn't know it. I don't agree with all of Twitter's moderation, but this is a symptom, not the disease.