10 ms·
I think that we are in agreement. Clearly right leaning voters self censored in 2016, leading to an outcome that was opposite of what the polls predicted. How
by efitz 5y ago
I think that we are in agreement. Clearly right leaning voters self censored in 2016, leading to an outcome that was opposite of what the polls predicted. How big tech relates to that is that it magnifies the tendency to self censor opinions that differ from the tech companies’ preferences.
- themacguffinman 5y agoWe definitely don't agree. The 2016 outcome was not the "opposite" of what polls predicted, it was simply the less likely outcome. Again, polling put Trump at low but plausible odds. If I tell you that you have a 30% chance of success and you succeed, that is not an "opposite" outcome. And your Big Tech self-censorship narrative has no discernable substance. Unusual levels of self-censorship would be reflected in unusual levels of polling error, but the actual polling error wasn't unusually high in 2016 [1]. Election polls aren't even conducted by Big Tech AFAIK and they don't have access to personally identifiable poll responses. Pretty hand-wavy and baseless to suggest that people were somehow afraid of Big Tech punishment based on anonymous third party polling. The Big Tech censorship issue centers almost entirely on user content submitted voluntarily on Big Tech platforms. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-werent-great-but-thats-pretty-normal/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-werent-great-...