Our analysis challenges a simple narrative that the internet as a technology is what fragments public discourse and polarizes opinions, by allowing us to inhabit filter bubbles or just read “the daily me.” If technology were the most important driver towards a “post-truth” world, we would expect to see symmetric patterns on the left and the right. Instead, different internal political dynamics in the right and the left led to different patterns in the reception and use of the technology by each wing. While Facebook and Twitter certainly enabled right-wing media to circumvent the gatekeeping power of traditional media, the pattern was not symmetric.
The size of the nodes marking traditional professional media like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, surrounded by the Hill, ABC, and NBC, tell us that these media drew particularly large audiences. Their color tells us that Clinton followers attended to them more than Drumpf followers, and their proximity on the map to more quintessentially partisan sites—like Huffington Post, MSNBC, or the Daily Beast—suggests that attention to these more partisan outlets on the left was more tightly interwoven with attention to traditional media. The Breitbart-centered wing, by contrast, is farther from the mainstream set and lacks bridging nodes that draw attention and connect it to that mainstream.
Moreover, the fact that these asymmetric patterns of attention were similar on both Twitter and Facebook suggests that human choices and political campaigning, not one company’s algorithm, were responsible for the patterns we observe. These patterns might be the result of a coordinated campaign, but they could also be an emergent property of decentralized behavior, or some combination of both. Our data to this point cannot distinguish between these alternatives... The primary explanation of such asymmetric polarization is more likely politics and culture than technology.
What we find in our data is a network of mutually-reinforcing hyper-partisan sites that revive what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics,” combining decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world. “Fake news,” which implies made of whole cloth by politically disinterested parties out to make a buck of Facebook advertising dollars, rather than propaganda and disinformation, is not an adequate term. By repetition, variation, and circulation through many associated sites, the network of sites make their claims familiar to readers, and this fluency with the core narrative gives credence to the incredible.
http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php
Another interesting thing is the cognitive dissonance of trumps voters. Lots of poor people voted for their own doom. And that's partly because they want to believe what's obviously and provable wrong. Craving for lies, cause the true world ain't fun anymore, I guess.
ReplyDeleteMarkus Feilner
ReplyDeleteThere was cognitive dissonance on both sides, Hillary having a +90% chance of winning for example.
Agreed, America clearly lacks the clarity and sanity to fix its problems. That's why there will be a cw2, I'm sure. Btw: Sanders would be considered a moderate conservative in the rest of the world, so the crazy right wing people have been governing the US for decades. That's the outside view, from countries that work. :-)
ReplyDeleteforbes.com - Unspeakable Realities Block Universal Health Coverage In America
ReplyDelete"Sanders would be considered a moderate conservative in the rest of the world"
ReplyDeleteActually I think that says far more about the rest of the world if Bernie "whites don't know what it's like to be poor" Sanders is considered a moderate.
Jeffery Liggett yep. Pleased to introduce my old friend sanity. She comes cloaked sometimes, but she'll prevail in the end.
ReplyDeleteI don't see how one can claim that believing Hilary was likely to win can be claimed as "cognitive dissonance". Pretty much all of the polls were indicating (pretty much all of the time) that that would be the result; Trump himself said that the election was rigged both before and even after the result ! So I'm not seeing what aspect of this is contradictory to other beliefs - it looks like a very straightforward evidenced-based opinion to me. At most it could be, "I don't like Clinton, but all the polls say everyone else does, so she'll probably win". That's perfectly self-consistent.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor Wasn't the problem about the election forecasts / polls that they only analysed the public vote, but not on state level?
ReplyDeleteOh, and I had quite some talks with Democrats or other non-GOP voters who would tell me "Don't worry, that's just the usual US folly, He'll never make it ..."
ReplyDeleteBut after all, you are right, I also think the C.D. is more on the Trump's voters' side.
ReplyDeleteMarkus Feilner Not conducting or reporting polls on state levels would definitely be a major flaw. Still, it wouldn't be "cognitive dissonance" since the media seemed to barely report them - at least, I don't remember seeing any such polls before the election. Then again, IIRC Clinton won the popular vote whilst losing the election by the largest margin ever.
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