4 ms·

Reading “their” news makes me scared and angry that people actually read this crap on purpose and presumably agree with much of it. How is that supposed to hel

by wffurr 6y ago

Reading “their” news makes me scared and angry that people actually read this crap on purpose and presumably agree with much of it. How is that supposed to help pop filter bubbles?

Hadjimina 6y ago
Personally, I think it is valuable to understand that the thought process behind political views. I may not agree with anything they say but I may be able to understand their reasoning behind it, which is already a big step. Also as a mental exercise I sometimes read an article I 100% disagree with but then try to actually formualte in my mind WHY the article is wrong instead of just saying "AHH THE EVIL LEFT/RIGHT ARE AT IT AGAIN WITH THEIR LIES". It's not as easy as one might expect it to be.
gremlinsinc 6y ago
I lean left but outside the Dem party I hangout /r/politics and lurk in /r/conservative and also checkout many socialist anarcho{communist|syndicalist|capitalist} and libertarian subs... I know what I feel is "right" and I feel confident I can tell B.S. I mean when the obvious goal is ...basically to make the op/commenter feel better about their "view" of the world then to me it's obviously something to take w/ a very small grain of salt, because real-world facts/figures/news isn't always pleasant it is what it is... Generally though I just like to get a "feel" for what others "think" so if I ever do start some non-profit or PAC or something (it's a goal eventually), then I can reach more people by being sympathetic to at least why they think they way they do. Sometimes I do chime in if I feel someone is clueless and maybe I could nudge them towards at least stretching their world view a little in a different direction. Something like this seems helpful, although as another commenter brought my attention to allsides.com which reminds me of alltop but for news, it seems a prettier implementation of this concept, would be nice though if there were story by story ratings... and people could declare their "views" and some ai scoring too...etc... TLDR: there's value in knowing how the "other side" thinks, feels, forms opinions - especially if you EVER hope to change those opinions. Ex-cultists are some of the best people to help others get out of said cult because they know what those people think and how the cognizant dissonance works.
- loonster 6y ago
  Reddit did a huge purge of conservatives in the past couple years (2020 especially). You will have to go somewhere else if you truly want a conservative viewpoint.
  - wffurr 6y ago
    ITYM they banned people for posting content encouraging violence and harassment, violating the terms of service. It just so happened that some large conservative subs were engaging in that behavior. Curious, isn't it?
    - loonster 6y ago
      They banned quite a but more than that. * Bans for mentioning a news article that mentioned the site of Hunter Biden's laptop leak. * Bans for disagreeing with the mask policies. * Bans for posting COVID-19 studies that are different than what is mainstream. * Bans for posting articles of a politician that is also an admin. * Bans for discussing election fraud. * Bans for upvoting content. The place has turned toxic.
      - mavhc 6y ago
        Not really a great advert for the intellectual heft of the right wing
  - watwut 6y ago
    That is not true. There are conservative subs. And in the same purges, let leading subs were closed for the similar issues. You however don't hear complaining on HR when leftist subs are closed.
    - loonster 6y ago
      It's not the subs, it the individual users that were purged the most. Some for the most grievous sin of upvoting wrongthink.
barry-cotter 6y ago
That’s what popping a filter bubble feels like. I followed Jacobin and a bunch of other accounts of people I disagree with when I started on Twitter. Learning more about people who hate you, your philosophy, beliefs and identities does not lead to any great improvements in your life so I stopped. Yes, the politically engaged out group really is like that. They really do hate you.
- mistermann 6y ago
  If just for fun, as a kind of thought experiment I suppose, a person decomposed this comment, unpacking each word or phrase into its pedantically precise meaning in this context, spending several hours on the task to squeeze every last drop of unambiguous meaning out of the the words, and then contemplated a literal reading of the final product in its uncompressed form...might this undertaking yield any interesting results? Maybe it's not clear what I have in mind, so I will give an example: the words "people", "you", "they"...what do these words refer to, precisely and explicitly (what entities do they encompass, and what do they not encompass)?
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    There are many, many people who would happily put you and your family in a gulag or concentration camp for your political beliefs if you have any, whatever they are. There are lots of people who believe that achieving their utopia is worth a lot of dead men, women and children. This is true whether you would pick the fascists or the communists given a forced choice between the two.
    - mistermann 6y ago
      I'm not saying it isn't plausible, and history contains many examples of such behavior, but my point is that the mind has this ability to imagine various scenarios of what could be true, but we speak of these neurologically generated virtual scenarios as if they are actually true. In this example, you even literally use the word "true" when referring to these ideas, demonstrating how real these simulated scenarios seem - to the mind, they are often indistinguishable from actual knowledge and first person experiences. This phenomenon is ever present in human behavior, in everything we do. In science, engineering, manufacturing, and "most" activities that humans engage in within the economic sphere, we typically apply fairly rigorous scrutiny to competing theories (consciously controlled imaginations) about the current and potential future states of reality, and as a result we tend to produce high quality and sometimes even amazing results (splitting the atom, landing robots on Mars, antibiotics & vaccines, the internet, etc)...but when it comes to normal day to day activities (our "actual lives", the underlying reason most people do all these other things at our place of employment), we seem to not only not apply similar levels of scrutiny to our thinking, but most people seem to consider the very idea to be outrageous, often passionately so. I think it's an interesting way to think about the world. Perhaps there is even some future value in thinking about the world in different ways, as there has been in the past.
grawprog 6y ago
Because if you actually stop to look at 'their' side and compare the news stories to 'your' side, you'll find both sides are full of exactly the same kind of loaded subjective language, usually written in the same adversarial tone and distort truth in some way to fit an agenda. In some cases you can literally take a story from one side, swap all the adjectives so they have the opposite meaning and congrats, you've now written a story for the other side. https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c
- riskable 6y ago
  > In some cases you can literally take a story from one side, swap all the adjectives so they have the opposite meaning and congrats, you've now written a story for the other side. This is not how media bias works. What you're referring to is how propaganda works (well, one type anyway: Where you report the opposite of the truth in order to confuse people into thinking, "I don't know who to believe anymore"). > https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c You know this video is satire, right? It's not real yet I'm getting a hint here that you might have taken it at face value.
- watwut 6y ago
  That is not actually true. Not in terms of how the person doing reading will perceive it. And not in terms of how world works. Real world is not perfectly symmetrical. It is not composed of two sides in the first place. In the second, even if you roughly split it, it rare ends up as "both are the same". That ideology of perfect center is just emotionally convenient model.
- hpcjoe 6y ago
  This. Worse is watching otherwise intelligent friends parrot the crap you see coming out of the propaganda arms of each party or party faction. They accept what they hear uncritically, as it feeds into their own beliefs (confirmation bias), without questioning the basis/interpretation. I've found for me, the lowest anxiety manner in which to consume news, is generally, to not consume it. In most cases, news in the US is propaganda (left, right, doesn't matter). It is a set of partial observations passed through ideological filters and summarized according to the desires of the presenters. There are no US based "news" organizations that do not have stakes in the outcome of their blather.
kolinko 6y ago
I actially prefer reading the news from „the other side”. I know very well news from „my” side from friends and the Facebook/twitter bubble, but I want to know the other viewpoints as well. Even if 70-90% of it is pure crap, I found that often „my” side is just as guilty of ommiting parts of information, and presenting things with sometimes extreme bias.
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  I was having lunch with a friend of mine recently, and he remarked that of his friends he had, I was the closest to being a Republican and he wondered what news site I read. He was surprised to learn that my go-tos were generally to the left of what he read, for exactly the reason you describe. If a story is getting attention across the spectrum, 'the opposition' is always more likely to capture the facts that you might miss.

by wffurr 6y ago

Reading “their” news makes me scared and angry that people actually read this crap on purpose and presumably agree with much of it. How is that supposed to help pop filter bubbles?

Hadjimina 6y ago

Personally, I think it is valuable to understand that the thought process behind political views. I may not agree with anything they say but I may be able to understand their reasoning behind it, which is already a big step. Also as a mental exercise I sometimes read an article I 100% disagree with but then try to actually formualte in my mind WHY the article is wrong instead of just saying "AHH THE EVIL LEFT/RIGHT ARE AT IT AGAIN WITH THEIR LIES". It's not as easy as one might expect it to be.

gremlinsinc 6y ago

I lean left but outside the Dem party I hangout /r/politics and lurk in /r/conservative and also checkout many socialist anarcho{communist|syndicalist|capitalist} and libertarian subs... I know what I feel is "right" and I feel confident I can tell B.S. I mean when the obvious goal is ...basically to make the op/commenter feel better about their "view" of the world then to me it's obviously something to take w/ a very small grain of salt, because real-world facts/figures/news isn't always pleasant it is what it is... Generally though I just like to get a "feel" for what others "think" so if I ever do start some non-profit or PAC or something (it's a goal eventually), then I can reach more people by being sympathetic to at least why they think they way they do. Sometimes I do chime in if I feel someone is clueless and maybe I could nudge them towards at least stretching their world view a little in a different direction. Something like this seems helpful, although as another commenter brought my attention to allsides.com which reminds me of alltop but for news, it seems a prettier implementation of this concept, would be nice though if there were story by story ratings... and people could declare their "views" and some ai scoring too...etc... TLDR: there's value in knowing how the "other side" thinks, feels, forms opinions - especially if you EVER hope to change those opinions. Ex-cultists are some of the best people to help others get out of said cult because they know what those people think and how the cognizant dissonance works.

loonster 6y ago
Reddit did a huge purge of conservatives in the past couple years (2020 especially). You will have to go somewhere else if you truly want a conservative viewpoint.
- wffurr 6y ago
  ITYM they banned people for posting content encouraging violence and harassment, violating the terms of service. It just so happened that some large conservative subs were engaging in that behavior. Curious, isn't it?
  - loonster 6y ago
    They banned quite a but more than that. * Bans for mentioning a news article that mentioned the site of Hunter Biden's laptop leak. * Bans for disagreeing with the mask policies. * Bans for posting COVID-19 studies that are different than what is mainstream. * Bans for posting articles of a politician that is also an admin. * Bans for discussing election fraud. * Bans for upvoting content. The place has turned toxic.
    - mavhc 6y ago
      Not really a great advert for the intellectual heft of the right wing
- watwut 6y ago
  That is not true. There are conservative subs. And in the same purges, let leading subs were closed for the similar issues. You however don't hear complaining on HR when leftist subs are closed.
  - loonster 6y ago
    It's not the subs, it the individual users that were purged the most. Some for the most grievous sin of upvoting wrongthink.

barry-cotter 6y ago

That’s what popping a filter bubble feels like. I followed Jacobin and a bunch of other accounts of people I disagree with when I started on Twitter. Learning more about people who hate you, your philosophy, beliefs and identities does not lead to any great improvements in your life so I stopped. Yes, the politically engaged out group really is like that. They really do hate you.

mistermann 6y ago
If just for fun, as a kind of thought experiment I suppose, a person decomposed this comment, unpacking each word or phrase into its pedantically precise meaning in this context, spending several hours on the task to squeeze every last drop of unambiguous meaning out of the the words, and then contemplated a literal reading of the final product in its uncompressed form...might this undertaking yield any interesting results? Maybe it's not clear what I have in mind, so I will give an example: the words "people", "you", "they"...what do these words refer to, precisely and explicitly (what entities do they encompass, and what do they not encompass)?
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  There are many, many people who would happily put you and your family in a gulag or concentration camp for your political beliefs if you have any, whatever they are. There are lots of people who believe that achieving their utopia is worth a lot of dead men, women and children. This is true whether you would pick the fascists or the communists given a forced choice between the two.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    I'm not saying it isn't plausible, and history contains many examples of such behavior, but my point is that the mind has this ability to imagine various scenarios of what could be true, but we speak of these neurologically generated virtual scenarios as if they are actually true. In this example, you even literally use the word "true" when referring to these ideas, demonstrating how real these simulated scenarios seem - to the mind, they are often indistinguishable from actual knowledge and first person experiences. This phenomenon is ever present in human behavior, in everything we do. In science, engineering, manufacturing, and "most" activities that humans engage in within the economic sphere, we typically apply fairly rigorous scrutiny to competing theories (consciously controlled imaginations) about the current and potential future states of reality, and as a result we tend to produce high quality and sometimes even amazing results (splitting the atom, landing robots on Mars, antibiotics & vaccines, the internet, etc)...but when it comes to normal day to day activities (our "actual lives", the underlying reason most people do all these other things at our place of employment), we seem to not only not apply similar levels of scrutiny to our thinking, but most people seem to consider the very idea to be outrageous, often passionately so. I think it's an interesting way to think about the world. Perhaps there is even some future value in thinking about the world in different ways, as there has been in the past.

grawprog 6y ago

Because if you actually stop to look at 'their' side and compare the news stories to 'your' side, you'll find both sides are full of exactly the same kind of loaded subjective language, usually written in the same adversarial tone and distort truth in some way to fit an agenda. In some cases you can literally take a story from one side, swap all the adjectives so they have the opposite meaning and congrats, you've now written a story for the other side. https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c

riskable 6y ago
> In some cases you can literally take a story from one side, swap all the adjectives so they have the opposite meaning and congrats, you've now written a story for the other side. This is not how media bias works. What you're referring to is how propaganda works (well, one type anyway: Where you report the opposite of the truth in order to confuse people into thinking, "I don't know who to believe anymore"). > https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c You know this video is satire, right? It's not real yet I'm getting a hint here that you might have taken it at face value.
watwut 6y ago
That is not actually true. Not in terms of how the person doing reading will perceive it. And not in terms of how world works. Real world is not perfectly symmetrical. It is not composed of two sides in the first place. In the second, even if you roughly split it, it rare ends up as "both are the same". That ideology of perfect center is just emotionally convenient model.
hpcjoe 6y ago
This. Worse is watching otherwise intelligent friends parrot the crap you see coming out of the propaganda arms of each party or party faction. They accept what they hear uncritically, as it feeds into their own beliefs (confirmation bias), without questioning the basis/interpretation. I've found for me, the lowest anxiety manner in which to consume news, is generally, to not consume it. In most cases, news in the US is propaganda (left, right, doesn't matter). It is a set of partial observations passed through ideological filters and summarized according to the desires of the presenters. There are no US based "news" organizations that do not have stakes in the outcome of their blather.

kolinko 6y ago

I actially prefer reading the news from „the other side”. I know very well news from „my” side from friends and the Facebook/twitter bubble, but I want to know the other viewpoints as well. Even if 70-90% of it is pure crap, I found that often „my” side is just as guilty of ommiting parts of information, and presenting things with sometimes extreme bias.

crocodiletears 6y ago
I was having lunch with a friend of mine recently, and he remarked that of his friends he had, I was the closest to being a Republican and he wondered what news site I read. He was surprised to learn that my go-tos were generally to the left of what he read, for exactly the reason you describe. If a story is getting attention across the spectrum, 'the opposition' is always more likely to capture the facts that you might miss.