4 ms·

Maybe Facebook doesn't have a conservative bias. Maybe it has more conservative content because Dems don't advertise on Facebook as much since they have most of

Maybe Facebook doesn't have a conservative bias. Maybe it has more conservative content because Dems don't advertise on Facebook as much since they have most of the news media. No conservative I know or have heard from feels like Facebook is on their side. Wouldn't they if Facebook was biasing content for the right?

true_religion 6y ago
So I hear this... but it never seems to make sense to me. Conservatives and liberals are in a vaguely 50/50 split population wise, and one would expect them to flock to news sources that cater to them. Liberal news media seems to have more total sources available, however, the conservative sources are larger. For example in TV it's NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN vs Fox. but last month Fox News hit record numbers, and was the most watched primetime network. > No conservative I know or have heard from feels like Facebook is on their side. So as a conservative, I always thought Facebook was a place to read things from my family & sources that I follow directly. I didn't imagine them to have a 'side'. This view of conservative america as some kind of embattled minority is very strange to me. We own the Senate. We own the presidency. We are the majority of the Supreme court. We are not the underdogs.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > This view of conservative america as some kind of embattled minority is very strange to me. We own the Senate. We own the presidency. We are the majority of the Supreme court. While half the country might be conservative, liberals control key junction points in the whole system. The people can send Republicans to Congress and the Presidency in a landslide, but the laws are ultimately implemented by an unelected bureaucracy, which is overwhelmingly Democrats. (Trump won just 4% of the vote in DC. He won 19% of the vote in New York City, by comparison.) Elected officials communicate with constituents through the media, 90%+ of whom donated to Clinton. Nearly every professor at Harvard identifies as a liberal: https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14469 https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14469. And now, there is increasing concern that online platforms are headed in the same direction. That's a big problem, because that gives liberals tremendous control over the means conservatives use to talk to each other. When Twitter can keep people from direct messaging a New York Post article to each other, or lock the account of the duly elected administration, that correctly alarms people.
  - tzs 6y ago
    > The people can send Republicans to Congress and the Presidency in a landslide, but the laws are ultimately implemented by an unelected bureaucracy, which is overwhelmingly Democrats. What is stopping Republicans from getting those bureaucratic jobs too?
    - dctoedt 6y ago
      > What is stopping Republicans from getting those bureaucratic jobs too? Many of them aren't especially attracted by quaint notions of serving, you know, the public.
    - akvadrako 6y ago
      I think they just don’t want them. Maybe because one can make more in private industry, or they don’t like dealing with bureaucracy. Same with being in academia.
tzs 6y ago
> No conservative I know or have heard from feels like Facebook is on their side. Wouldn't they if Facebook was biasing content for the right? No, because Facebook biases the content any given individual sees toward things that fit in better with that person's beliefs. What you can infer about their biasing from what you personally see doesn't tell much if anything about their biasing other people see, or whether or not Facebook is biased as a whole in any particular way. When it comes to liberal vs. conservative biasing, there is also a problem from squeezing an array of behaviors and beliefs down to just those two labels. I remember reading an article that tried to show Twitter was massively biased against conservatives. The author found a bunch of accounts that were banned, then took the subset of those for which he could infer from their tweets and retweets whether they had voted for Trump or Clinton in the 2016 election. That left something like 20 accounts, 19 of which voted for Trump. He concluded that Twitter was massively biased against conservatives. The problem with that is that since we are de facto a two party system, anyone who wanted their vote to matter had to pick Trump or Clinton. Who, for example, are white supremacist or Nazi or "death to all Muslim" people going to pick among those two? Neither most Republicans nor most Democrats support those people. Democrats though are more likely than Republicans to consider them to be a problem that needs to be actively dealt with now. Republicans are more likely to consider them to be a potential problem that doesn't need to be addressed now. And so the white supremacist vote or the Nazi vote goes heavily to R.

true_religion 6y ago

So I hear this... but it never seems to make sense to me. Conservatives and liberals are in a vaguely 50/50 split population wise, and one would expect them to flock to news sources that cater to them. Liberal news media seems to have more total sources available, however, the conservative sources are larger. For example in TV it's NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN vs Fox. but last month Fox News hit record numbers, and was the most watched primetime network. > No conservative I know or have heard from feels like Facebook is on their side. So as a conservative, I always thought Facebook was a place to read things from my family & sources that I follow directly. I didn't imagine them to have a 'side'. This view of conservative america as some kind of embattled minority is very strange to me. We own the Senate. We own the presidency. We are the majority of the Supreme court. We are not the underdogs.

rayiner 6y ago
> This view of conservative america as some kind of embattled minority is very strange to me. We own the Senate. We own the presidency. We are the majority of the Supreme court. While half the country might be conservative, liberals control key junction points in the whole system. The people can send Republicans to Congress and the Presidency in a landslide, but the laws are ultimately implemented by an unelected bureaucracy, which is overwhelmingly Democrats. (Trump won just 4% of the vote in DC. He won 19% of the vote in New York City, by comparison.) Elected officials communicate with constituents through the media, 90%+ of whom donated to Clinton. Nearly every professor at Harvard identifies as a liberal: https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14469 https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14469. And now, there is increasing concern that online platforms are headed in the same direction. That's a big problem, because that gives liberals tremendous control over the means conservatives use to talk to each other. When Twitter can keep people from direct messaging a New York Post article to each other, or lock the account of the duly elected administration, that correctly alarms people.
- tzs 6y ago
  > The people can send Republicans to Congress and the Presidency in a landslide, but the laws are ultimately implemented by an unelected bureaucracy, which is overwhelmingly Democrats. What is stopping Republicans from getting those bureaucratic jobs too?
  - dctoedt 6y ago
    > What is stopping Republicans from getting those bureaucratic jobs too? Many of them aren't especially attracted by quaint notions of serving, you know, the public.
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    I think they just don’t want them. Maybe because one can make more in private industry, or they don’t like dealing with bureaucracy. Same with being in academia.

tzs 6y ago

> No conservative I know or have heard from feels like Facebook is on their side. Wouldn't they if Facebook was biasing content for the right? No, because Facebook biases the content any given individual sees toward things that fit in better with that person's beliefs. What you can infer about their biasing from what you personally see doesn't tell much if anything about their biasing other people see, or whether or not Facebook is biased as a whole in any particular way. When it comes to liberal vs. conservative biasing, there is also a problem from squeezing an array of behaviors and beliefs down to just those two labels. I remember reading an article that tried to show Twitter was massively biased against conservatives. The author found a bunch of accounts that were banned, then took the subset of those for which he could infer from their tweets and retweets whether they had voted for Trump or Clinton in the 2016 election. That left something like 20 accounts, 19 of which voted for Trump. He concluded that Twitter was massively biased against conservatives. The problem with that is that since we are de facto a two party system, anyone who wanted their vote to matter had to pick Trump or Clinton. Who, for example, are white supremacist or Nazi or "death to all Muslim" people going to pick among those two? Neither most Republicans nor most Democrats support those people. Democrats though are more likely than Republicans to consider them to be a problem that needs to be actively dealt with now. Republicans are more likely to consider them to be a potential problem that doesn't need to be addressed now. And so the white supremacist vote or the Nazi vote goes heavily to R.