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> It states that 12% of voters accounted for 50% of all social-media and Twitter users – and are six times as active on social media as are other sections of th
by dmurray 6y ago
> It states that 12% of voters accounted for 50% of all social-media and Twitter users – and are six times as active on social media as are other sections of the population.
That's not a tiny minority: it's a pretty reasonable dispersal of social media use. 12% of the population accounting for 50% of anything is a more egalitarian distribution than we see with, say: wealth, healthcare use, or educational attainment.
Public discourse was dominated by a "tiny minority" when the only people with a wide-reaching mouthpiece were a few hundred journalists and a few hundred politicians.
I don't really disagree with the article's main claim - that the more extreme views are overrepresented on social media - but it's not a numbers thing.
- thinkingemote 6y ago12% of voters is not 12% of the population. People who didn't vote, People who are too young to vote, People who cannot vote. Etc Voters as a group is meant to reflect that proportion of the population that is involved with the political process at the basic level.
- dmurray 6y agoGood point. Only about 50% of Britons voted in the Brexit referendum, for a turnout of 72% [0]. So the inequality is twice what I made it out to be there. I don't think it changes my comparisons all that much: we don't usually consider infants when measuring inequality in wealth or educational attainments either, or we use their caregivers as a proxy. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European...
- raverbashing 6y agoAnd to add to that, not all of those 12% take hyper-polarizing stances