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Imgur has large amounts of curated propaganda on its front page nowadays despite claiming to be social & voted etc. No republican is mentioned except to condemn
by harry8 5y ago
Imgur has large amounts of curated propaganda on its front page nowadays despite claiming to be social & voted etc. No republican is mentioned except to condemn them or agree with Democrat orthodoxy. Nothing criticising any mainstream democrat appears ever on the front page. You won't see something funny by a Sanders supporter criticising Hilary in any circumstances, for example. As long as there is no criticism of a Democrat there's a reasonable amount of very left wing supporting posts. eg "People deserve healthcare, rich don't pay tax, middle america has been robbed etc." The only exceptions are for the pariahs Sinema & Manchin - who opposed the mainstream. Plenty of vitriol there, which even if you think it's entirely justified underscores how there is none, zero, elsewhere.
Imgur used to show currently viral images and was all about entertainment and filled a fairly similar niche to Tik Tok. Nowadays it has gone down the outrage engagement path(?) Politics seems like most of the content and it's so curated that it's feels like Pravda levels of blatant propaganda - even reading takes that seem to agree with what you were already thinking gives you pause that you must have missed something. I'm predicting there will be zero "anti-war" posts advocating that the US stay out of the Russia-Ukraine disaster. None. Such a position, right or wrong, is likely to be held by a signficant fraction of Imgur users and indeed Democrats.
Imgur is so extreme as to be obvious especially in the light of how dramatically it changed, which is instructive for us as an example. How would we know if facebook and twitter were playing with their algorithms with just a little more subtlety than that? (And maybe in an utterly different, unpredictable and unexpected direction?)
- Talanes 5y agoIt's not the Pravda, it's just a bunch of left-leaning kids doing the meme version of political discourse. Same energy as my high school in the mid 2000's, just the names have changed. It's grating and immature, but it does plausibly reflect an actual demographic.
- harry8 5y agoObiviously it isn't the Pravda. Maybe it's all organic and a totally fair reflection? How do you explain the change from an almost equal amount of eye-rollingly bad pro-trump stuff as there is pro-biden stuff now to zero. There was vast amounts of pro-sanders, anti-democratic establishment stuff ranging from fair to pretty silly that all suddenly vanished too. I also have trouble with the sheer consistency of the viewpoint. It's one voice, there's no variation to speak of at all. I've never seen any realistic crowd chatter that works that way. Have you? But sure, I guess it's possible. How would you know that's what it is? How would you know if Facebook and Twitter were tweaking their algorithms to drive public opinion? It's the whole point of this. How would you find that out?