The examples provided in the article seem fine. No one actually cared about the Taylor Swift drama despite it being all over social media. Bernie fans were greatly overrepresented online, and white male Bernie fans even more so. This is a real phenomenon, and it doesn't always occur, but it's a good reminder that you shouldn't take twitter discourse too seriously. What kind of data would you want to back it up?
Bernie fans are mostly white men, they are overwhelming young too. The author said "this was shown to be false" but no source is provided.. and the author is wrong. (I suspect the author read a very misleading Vox article that makes the claim the author parroted)
So if the author had done research and used sources, they may not have made a bunch of factual errors.
Are you trolling me? Yes Bernie was popular among young white men, but they are one part of a larger coalition. Even the links you provided showed that he had plenty of support from minorities. Sure old black woman favored Biden, but they aren't the only other demographic. Characterizing his movement as mainly bernie bros is pure propaganda.
I can't tell who's trolling who now, but how stastics are worded is key here. The comment you replied to doesn't disagree with any of the claims you're making here are implying.
From the second linked article:
> although it seems Sanders’s base is hardly all white, it’s likely that no matter who wins the nomination ... a clear majority of their votes will probably come from white Democrats
This directly contradicts the original article's quote:
> there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters
Additionally, the article's next sentence:
> The movement, in fact, consisted of a diverse coalition of people from marginalized races and genders
Appears to be an attempt at proving the majority isn't white, but it doesn't support that claim at all. It can be true that there was a diverse coalition of voters, and white people still make up a majority of votes.
Then, of all your three claims, none of them disprove the claim that most Bernie voters are white. Everything you said could be true, but none weaken the claims of the comment you're replying to.
I suspect at least someone here doesnt understand that "60% of Latino voters and 30% of white voters" doesn't imply "white is not the majority vote" (since, for example, 60% of 10 is significantly less than 30% of 1000).
Yeah, it feels like you're trolling me. White vote, vs white men, is clearly different. America is a majority white country so obviously most votes will come from white people. Saying Bernie's support comes mostly from white men, as was claimed by the post I was referring to and the Bernie Bro narrative, is false.
> No one actually cared about the Taylor Swift drama
The Swifties cared.
Two close friends of mine, both of them Swifties, went to a The 1975 concert only because Healy had been linked to Taylor Swift. Said two friends live half a world away from the States and hadn't listened to The 1975 at all until all this scandal. They also are totally in the dark when it comes to ct, Adam Friedland or rs.
I can't help with references for research about this but I was thinking that this is a somewhat related phenomena to statistics like how the majority of the content on wikipedia comes from a surprisingly small number of people. I believe there are some actual hard numbers around that. Not sure if anyone has tried to quantify and study what this article is talking about, though.
One example that comes to mind for me and is pretty well documented is the defund police movement. The black population in the US overwhelmingly wants more police on the streets in their communities. The movement was popularized by a small minority of the very fringe view. Other people joined thinking they were standing in solidarity with the back community, but we're actually working against it's desires.
My own anecdotal experience on reddit and HN is that much of the heavy lifting can be done by just a few people "guarding new." This is a good thing sometimes, efficiency is nice, but it can also be manipulated.
There seem to be some keywords that trigger a pre-organized group to descend upon a post in New and downvote/report/flag it into oblivion.
There was a piece documenting how easily, and cheaply, it is to manipulate reddit a few years ago. I can't seem to find it now.
I would like to add that sometimes my posts get flagged, such as a recent one complaining of poor writing, and that's fair enough.
meta: hilariously, this piece was flagged while I was writing this comment, so I vouched for it.
If someone could give some reasons why TFA is not interesting and deserves flagging, I would love to hear them.
I took a look at my profile the other day and realized that I'd somehow inadvertently flagged a bunch of posts and comments. Guessing it was a UI thing, trying to hit 'context' instead of flag.
Yeah, I have found the same in my profile. This has been discussed recently in various posts. That's why the flagged link is in the profile now.
There is a major temporal component to posts, comments, and flagging. I am not sure what good comes from unflagging my mistakenly flagged items when they are usually at least days old by the time I notice.
Considering the gravity of that particular mechanic, I would argue that something along the lines of the "are you sure?" prompt used in the delete action would be really helpful.
Looks like I've got a bunch too, including several posts that I'd actually upvoted.
Related issue: it's too easy to accidentally mix up the upvote and downvote actions, because the buttons are close together and the visual feedback after the fact is pretty subtle. This is particularly bad on mobile.
> That should rarely matter, because multiple users have to flag a submission or comment for it to become actually flagged.
That's what I thought. If you don't mind taking a moment, is there any rational reason by your reading why the linked article would deserve multiple flags on HN?
This may be conspiratorial thinking on my part, but if I was part of an influence voting ring, I would want to make this type of article disappear. If that's the case then the voting (flagging) ring might have just outed themselves to the admins, no?
It seems like people aren’t consciously aware of both how easy it is to game online platforms and how distorted our perception of numbers are online.
You can make the tiniest issue seem like a massive global concern without much effort, better yet enlist your friends and you can get the issue trending on other sites too because now lazy orgs have no problem using Reddit as a source. It’s of course not just Reddit, every platform has deep problems with people gaming their prevention systems, bot farms, trading accounts, and so on. That’s before you get into groups/corporations actively trying to push a very specific narrative in an organized effort.
It plays into the second thing I mentioned which was the distortion of numbers. The way we perceive stats online is very interesting, in that 2000 followers is a tiny insignificant thing, but 2000 upvotes is a major thread. This general distortion makes it very difficult imo for people to really grasp when something online is “real”.
So I get why some just opt out and view online life as just a funny thing irrelevant to reality. It’s kind of easier that way.
IME the bubbles are common across large cities -- and because they're bubbles, "normal people" are all inside the bubble while outside the bubble is only Bad People™.
Without getting into politically sensitive specifics, I have a friend (offline and on) who for years believed that the attitudes offline were radically different from what they were, based on their experiences online. Then they'd run into the offline reality and become genuinely upset, thinking that they were just surrounded by awful people. In the end they moved to a place they believed would be more accepting, only to find pretty much identical attitudes.
All because they slowly, over years, curated their online experience to the point that they truly believed it reflected some real offline. I'm not a HUGE fan of stand up comedy, but the line, "Twitter isn't a real place" is something people need to fully internalize.
Interesting to consider, as I do think that is accurate. But I also think people are more accepting in person than they are anywhere else. There is an odd barrier that the "other" group is always disconnected. If you are there talking to them, you must not be truly the other group.
It might have been an accident. Super easy to flag on mobile. When I look at flagged submissions in my profile it's a bunch of stuff I didn't intend to flag. UI needs a confirm popup for flagging IMO.
I don't have access to HN's or Reddit's data, but I suspect that it only takes a few dozen people to accomplish the "heavy lifting" you had mentioned. This is particularly noticeable on city/state subreddits, where you quickly notice who 'the usual suspects' are because they comment so consistently and show their ideological bias so readily. These folks may or may not be coordinating on a discord, but I ultimately think they have an activist mindset and are driven to try and control the discourse on the community they see as "theirs".
I've seen people in smaller city subreddits try and stand up to these folks, but they end up getting about a dozen downvotes on all their posts. They probably don't have the energy to keep putting up with all the contentiousness and they almost always give up trying to argue and the echo chamber is restored.
there's definitely an inertia to the voting system, once someone gets up or down voted they're likely to keep going on the same direction. definitely seems like a major flaw in the voting system.
There is a talk about social bots from the ccc in German. At the end social bots didn’t have any influence. The most influence came from one 60 year old guy who didn’t stop posting right wing propaganda.
So yea one person is sufficient.
There's a UK-based subreddit that's flipped so hard from left-wing to right-wing lately that I'm convinced it's orchestrated. But not just in the "spam and move on" way we're familiar with from a decade back; there's real effort being put into the comments. The posts and comments are hitting all the current government's talking points in a way I find incredibly suspicious. (And when I say that, I sound like a conspiracy theorist. You can't win).
An important thing that I don't think many people realize:
On big popular sites like reddit, especially on main sub posts, you can find any opinion you want in the comments. What this means is that if you are pushing an agenda, you don't need to be the originator of the comments/posts. You can use unknowing bystanders to carry your banner for you, giving the content much more legitimacy.
I don't think people understand how pervasive this is. Being able to control upvotes is far more powerful than being able to generate authentic looking accounts with strongly persuasive comments.
with the war in ukraine, for example, i find a huge disconnect about how reality is described in the media and some actions are seen as evident and necessary, and how people in my social circle feel about it...
I think the difference is that this is manufactured consent from activists instead of an establishment consensus. A well coordinated movement with charismatic leaders can take over social media with wild takes as long as they can avoid getting banned.
Funny how people just get a rough impression of things and then "go with it".
Her view of Sanders' 2020 bid was that people like herself were a big part of it--even 80 year old Nepalese grandmas were Sanders boosters, after all!
I think what really happened is that Democratic insiders, both in the media and the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring. Why did they engage in this evil plot? Not because they dislike Sanders so much, as because he would have been hopeless in the General.
I don't know. But if you want to study the question, you can see something happen similar right now with a very different politician, RFK jr. The average impression of the guy is "kook" but he's pretty sensible. (I mean, in terms of issues, he's shit, but that's completely irrelevant.)
I don't think the author made any crazy claims about Bernie. He did have a diverse coalition that was maligned as Bernie bros. He also didn't have the election stolen in sc or super tuesday, he simply wasn't that popular and could only get wins when 6 moderate candidates were splitting the vote. RFK is an entirely different phenomenon.
I think she's reasonably questioning to what degree that lack of popularity was constructed by the media hammering certain narratives (like the Bernie Bros narrative) that were later shown to be mostly false.
The point of her article is that narratives in the online world can be generated by a tiny number of people, but can then seem to represent a majority view, come to shape the majority view and create self-fulfilling prophecies.
>...the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring....
I don't disagree that the mainstream media may have hurt him(though I'm not convinced they did). I'm mainly disagreeing that anything bad happened during the primary process with sc and super tuesday.
A tangential "sigh" idea: are we ever going to see an American president younger than 70, or has the age of gerontocracy truly arrived?
In a two-party system, massive clout accrues to people who are in the game for the longest time. Offices, lobbyists, donors, name recognition. Prior to the advances of the modern medicine, natural aging would push back against this trend. But now we are seeing ever more old people in positions of power.
It is somewhat better in Europe (Sunak and Macron are relatively young, so is Zelensky), but America seems to be very susceptible to that - not just in politics, in business, too (the average age of Fortune 500 CEOs increased a lot since 2000).
John Adams lived to 90, Sam Adams to 81, Ben Franklin to 84, John Jay to 83, Thomas Jefferson to 83, James Madison to 85. Some of their lives could definitely have been extended, but I think people generally misunderstand human longevity. The peaks of ages have not really changed much at all, and a reasonable chunk of people who made it past childhood/birth (where there were indeed extremely high mortality rates), would make it there. For instance Hippocrates, of the Hippocratic Oath, lived to beyond 90, back in 400BC.
He could only get wins when all of the other candidates didn't collude with each other. Those 6 candidates were election stuffing to take focus off of Bernie, to the point that almost all of them pretended to be for single-payer health care. Pretending to support single-payer is literally the only reason that Harris made the national stage. The only reason Buttigieg entered the picture is because he was a nobody that was put up in the same way to split the liberal-left vote for DNC chair from Keith Ellison.
The idea that Bernie's loss is because he "wasn't that popular" withers under the fact that Biden won the election. Biden wasn't even popular among Democratic Party insiders, they just 1) had no leverage to make him stop his campaign, and 2) their preferred candidates like Harris and Buttigieg were far more repulsive to the public than Biden.
The fairness of voting, auctions, etc. wither under collusion.
This is conspiratorial thinking. Here is an alternative: people that want to win adopt popular positions. Then when a candidate drops out their supporters go to the next most similar candidate. Not that complicated. The primaries were vicious, with people like Harris accusing Biden of being a segregationist. They were not pretending to run for president.
The reason Biden wasn't popular among insiders is that they didn't think he could win. People like Obama specifically declined to endorse anyone until the winner was clear so that he wouldn't bias the outcomes and hurt their chances in the general. They fell in line when they saw Biden win the primaries.
Bernie losing could be explained by him simply not being popular. Trump was in a similar position, but trashed the Republican primaries because he was genuinely popular.
If you think the idea that politicians were colluding with each other (or cooperating for a more neutral word) is conspiratorial then you should just be disqualified from this conversation.
The difference is that their behavior is proper and makes sense, not an effort to steal attention from Bernie. I'll repeat again, the candidates were absolutely not burning through money, time, and political capital for a pretend presidential run to take attention away from Sanders. They were different flavors of moderate to appeal to the largely moderate base. Even if Sanders was entitled to more attention(he's wasn't), there is no reason to think Amy Klobachar or Cory Booker voters would go for Bernie over Biden when their policies are closer to Biden.
No people really did not like Bernie that much. He was making a lot of promises that he did not have the political capital or chops to deliver on; and a lot of people saw through it.
Not to mention that his cohort of rabid online supporters were as insufferable as those supporting the orange man; thus giving his campaign a similar kool aid drinking cult vibe.
As far as the talk about other candidates forming a coalition against him … that whole line of argument is pretty laughable. This is politics. Success in politics is achieved by building coalitions among constituencies and their representatives to advance policy.
If Bernie were such an effective politician then why was he unable to get someone else to stay in the primary to split the establishment vote?
I don't see how that is ridiculous. Are you suggesting that if it was Bernie vs Biden from day 1 that Bernie would have won? Bernie never polled well enough for that, so you're suggesting a wildly different counter factual.
The notion that Bernie is more popular among "both parties and among independents" is fantasy. Sanders is bonafide far left. He is a brilliant person and has wonderful ideas, but he had 0 chance in a general.
But I get where the "more popular among both" myth comes from. Loads of right wingers talked him up because they think this is their clever divide and conquer approach, and it is simply amazing that anyone actually falls for. It's the same way the guy above -- a guy who a couple of days ago was commenting on here about the Democratic party deep state in the federal government trying to railroad poor innocent Trump -- talks up RFK Jr. That absolute nutter RFK Jr gets 100% of his airtime by the far right who have made him their current Bernie. He's their Token "Democrat", now that Tulsi Gabbard has gone so far off the far right deep end that she can't play the part anymore.
> The notion that Bernie is more popular among "both parties and among independents" is fantasy. Sanders is bonafide far left. He is a brilliant person and has wonderful ideas, but he had 0 chance in a general.
Your assumption seems to be that people's political preferences fall on a single dimension dictated by the Establishment's Overton Window. I see now reason to assume that.
Noam Chomsky has gotten standing ovations in places like deeply rural and xenophobic California. Even though he's an anarchist.
(Sanders' policy preferences, on the other end, aren't even far left—they're only “far left” because the Overton Window of American politics is far right.)
> But I get where the "more popular among both" myth comes from. Loads of right wingers talked him up because they think this is their clever divide and conquer approach, and it is simply amazing that anyone actually falls for.
I hate how people denigrate "conspiracy theories". Of course people can conspire: a small group of people with a lot of power can definitely get together in smoke-filled backrooms.
But this theory of yours is much more unlikely: a lot of right-wingers seemingly organically cheering on people like Bernie Sanders in order to divide-and-conquer the Left (whatever "the Left" is). That kind of mass astroturfing is much harder to pull off.
What's more likely? That many right-wingers simply like Sanders, or that thousands of them got together and decided to, against all of their instincts, fake enthusiasm in public in order to own-the-libs?
>Your assumption seems to be that people's political preferences fall on a single dimension dictated by the Establishment's Overton Window
There are many dimensions, from healthcare to social security to immigration to wealth redistribution to law and order to "backing the blue" to the military to taxes, and on all of them Bernie is the absolutely diametric opposite of Trump. The idea that if Bernie were the candidate people would switch their vote from Trump to Bernie is simply preposterous, and I am in awe that anyone actually fell for this. On the flip side if Bernie were the candidate it would have been incredibly easy for the right to fear-monger and denigrate.
And regarding the definitions of left and right, clearly this is in the context of the US.
>What's more likely? That many right-wingers simply like Sanders, or that thousands of them got together and decided to, against all of their instincts, fake enthusiasm in public in order to own-the-libs?
You surely realize that "loving the adversary of my most potent adversary" (e.g. the enemy of my enemy is my friend) is like a fundamental human trait, right? That it is seen across society, for the duration of mankind's existence. From geopolitics, to sports, to billionaires and MMA matches. This is a foundational human trait.
The "right" tends to be more engaged and ego-attached to politics, so their machinations in this regard tend to be much, much louder.
> The idea that if Bernie were the candidate people would switch their vote from Trump to Bernie is simply preposterous, and I am in awe that anyone actually fell for this.
I am such a person, and back then there were plenty of others who expressed similar sentiments. All it takes for you to be literally incorrect is two people.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
Pretty convenient that he wasn't the candidate, right? Suddenly you could pat yourself on the back, convince yourself that your hand was forced.
There are loads of situations where people try to rationalize their own behavior through mechanisms like this.
Two fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods and says "Morning boys. How's the water?" The younger fish beat the older fish to death and take his wallet. "He should have known I'm allergic to water!" one lamented. "He made me do that".
> Pretty convenient that he wasn't the candidate, right?
Convenient for some (roughly: the better off), not so convenient for others.
>Suddenly you could pat yourself on the back, convince yourself that your hand was forced.
Provided one has an adequately powerful imagination I suppose.
>There are loads of situations where people try to rationalize their own behavior through mechanisms like this.
Or their beliefs!
> Two fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods and says "Morning boys. How's the water?" The younger fish beat the older fish to death and take his wallet. "He should have known I'm allergic to water!" one lamented. "He made me do that".
I'm not sure I understand the anecdote, could you explain?
> I think what really happened is that Democratic insiders, both in the media and the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring. Why did they engage in this evil plot? Not because they dislike Sanders so much, as because he would have been hopeless in the General.
This narrative (not good for the General) is of course their preferred one. But I am not inclined to take them on their word when they chose to smear him with a “red herring” (your words) in the first place.
The 2016 election was when people started complaining about Populism, and both Trump and Sanders were populists in rhetoric, although very different in their substance. But the Dems would still have us believe that a non-populist, completely Establishment candidate (Clinton) was what the Dems needed for the General.
The more likely explanation is that the Dems would rather lose rather than run with a social democratic candidate.
>The more likely explanation is that the Dems would rather lose rather than run with a social democratic candidate.
Their behavior does suggest this. It's why they're propping up an octogenarian who is one "senior moment" away from handing the presidency to the other party.
"Electability" was a ruse in 2016 and 2020 that they no longer need to keep up.
RFK has been branded a “kook” because of his anti-vaccine activism and because of outlandish statements like COVID may have been engineered to spare Jews. That’s pretty much the definition of kookiness.
I’ve seen and experienced this first-hand. It happens a lot in niche music scenes. The internet will explode with rage about something someone in a band did or didn’t do, it will seem as if the whole world is united in rage or ridicule! …And then they go on tour and nothing is different. Or they post a statement and receive a flood of “This is the first I’ve heard about it.”
They have after show backstage parties where they invite fans to, well, party. Some girls are accusing mainly the lead singer of behaving badly. The media jumps on it to demonize the band, trying to find new "victims" / people who regret past decisions. Activists protest outside the concert venues. Their fans don't care. Just the usual..
No charges have been filed by any of the supposed victims and the investigations started by state attorneys were quickly dropped, after which the conversation moved on to feminist talking points of power dynamics and the partiarchy. The point is that the media again hyped up a single person's account turned shitstorm posted online.
I don’t know about that one, seems like there are some pretty serious allegations. But yes, it is likely that the number of people who are aware and talking makes up a tiny portion of their worldwide fans, despite the spread of the news online.
From personal experience, I find that playing dumb and dismissive with online discourse that leaks into real life works the best. Most of these things are incredibly unimportant, and even strongly opinionated people start to falter when they find themselves having to explain their dumb culture war stuff to you. Obviously if it's a serious mainstream issue you shouldn't do this.
It actually works pretty great on those too. "Serious mainstream issues" are exactly the same kind of thing as fabricated internet drama, just fabricated by older and much better funded groups.
I don't know, I think there are some exceptions to this. It's very difficult to play dumb when a friend confides in you about their concerns getting an IUD in certain political landscapes. During the height of covid, more than one asian friend asked me to be around them in public due to the rise of anti-asian sentiment in my country, and it would've been wildly inappropriate for me to play dumb then. Most recently more than one non-feminine woman friend have asked me for the same due to anti-transgender rhetoric (I've had one confide in me a harrowing experience getting harassed by someone assuming she was transgender... she's just skinny with a short haircut).
I vividly remember Muslims in my team coming to concerned for their families when the trump travel ban began. They were confused why they were being singled out and worried about being persecuted at work and school. I couldn’t explain because I honestly never understood, but I could assure them I wouldn’t stand for any such thing at work and assure them I didn’t sympathize with the politics, and I would be their advocate if they needed it. I expressed hope that schools wouldn’t stand for it either and advised them to also reach out to their guidance counselors at school to be sure they were aware of their concerns.
Whether these are issues manufactured or not, they translate into real fears that play out across many people, in profound ways. It’s important to be engaged to protect people in fear, whether you share their backgrounds or beliefs - because we all can share an understanding of fear, and hopefully none of us wish it on others.
The problem is not so much that a minority sets the agenda, but that a majority falls for it. I see outrageous flat-out lies that otherwise intelligent folks consume without questioning.
As the article says: journalists take social media for gospel. They're totally addicted to twitter. That's an important source for trends and vox populi for them, and that's where all the commotion about Musk's reign comes from (and from the people that the journalists follow, because they'll lose their influence, and thus power and what comes with it).
The majority reads what these journalists write. If it seems reasonable, they'll accept it. When they're browbeaten, they'll also accept it, but with a grudge. But don't forget that there are different political, religous and cultural leanings in all media, so the majority is not uniform. Silent they are, though.
When news outlets cut budgets, sites like Twitter/Threads/FB are the only sources they can afford. Whereas before, they might get some time/money to do some real investigation, now they have to submit articles to get paid, and need to write articles on the cheap so they make out ahead.
There are some outlets, like The Intercept, that are still doing great investigative work, but they get drowned out among the other options, which isn't surprising when so few people own so much of the most popular new outlets.
Journalists are addicted to attribution. Before Twitter, they had to call people for quotes verifying or denying something. The tradition was 2 sources to verify. There was even a time that anonymous sources were frowned on. If they couldn't get them on the phone, they had to track them down and ask in person. That's why there are multiple scenes in "All the President's Men" where the reporters are knocking on doors at people's houses at night.
All that is old school now and replaced by the quick drug-like hit of posting "so-and-so tweeted". It's enough to write about a post of some kind and not actually get comments or context from anybody else, because there always posts for "opponents say" or "advocates say".
I was a web developer for a newspaper and knew they were doomed when they started writing articles about their own comments section.
Having actually been the subject of news stories a few times (appearing in multiple papers each time), I doubt that. Journalists managed to shuffle quotes around people, e.g. putting my words in someone else’s mouth or someone else’s in mine, or creatively edited what I said and hence distorting it (published inside double quotes of course), even though I gave all of them a printed document of everything I said in the interview and more.
You're conflating attribution and accuracy. They found in you someone to attribute the statements to, but didn't do it accurately. Quoting someone is a special kind of deflection of responsibility. Same if it's a verbal quote or a tweet.
The old times, before the make-a-clickbait-story-out-of-a-random-tweet-and-verify-nothing era, though two cases happened after the literal advent of Twitter.
I've been down-voted into obscurity too many times for simply telling people to question and think. How often do articles make it to the front of HN about sensational accusations? Accusations, not convictions.
I have not seen such a thing happening, except for the so-called "moderation" which claims all sides are right. But that's not real moderation, or objectivity, is it?
Interesting that Russia needed to base this operation within Ukraine and use Ukrainian SIM cards. Maybe it was targeted at Ukrainians and wanted to appear as being from Ukraine in social media recommendation feeds?
That plus that social media companies have gotten a bit more hip to this but have a much easier time banning stuff located in Russia. Much easier to filter by 'source country' than by content... Russian operatives can blend in very easily in Ukraine and Latvia because there is a large chunk of the population that speaks Russian natively. Doing that in say NL or France would be far harder without attracting some kind of scrutiny. And possibly they have other duties besides.
I'm saying this could be internal Ukrainian resistance, composed of military-aged men who are sick and tired of being forcefully sent to the front-lines (there are numerous videos of military-aged men being abducted from the streets of Ukraine in order to be sent to said front-lines).
Ok. You seem to be very eager to connect things that aren't necessarily connected and I'd suggest a change of sources for your information. Up to 3 months ago volunteers outnumbered training capacity, 'numerous videos of military aged men being abducted from the streets of Ukraine in order to be sent to said front-lines' is the purest form of Russian propaganda. Yes, Ukraine has a conscript army, yes, there are deserters, no, there are no 'abductions' by the Ukrainian army, though if deserters are arrested they face up to 10 years in prison.
The only country where people are abducted from the streets to be sent to the front is in Russia, and in Russian occupied territory.
> 'numerous videos of military aged men being abducted from the streets of Ukraine in order to be sent to said front-lines' is the purest form of Russian propaganda
I don't think the numerous such videos I saw were fake, and them being used by Russian propaganda didn't make them any less real.
> no, there are no 'abductions' by the Ukrainian army,
[1] January 2023
[2] June 2023
[3] July 2023
[4] Three days ago, the beginning of August 2023
And these are just the most "famous".
On a more general note, it doesn't surprise me that the audience of this forum is the prime target of NAFO-like thinking, to the contrary.
That is exactly what those sim boxes are for, in case you were wondering. Really, you should just lay off stuff like this if you don't have personal contacts in Ukraine that relay to you what is going on. Otherwise the chances are very high that you're being sold a bill of goods there is absolutely no way to prove or disprove any of this if it is second hand if it isn't from a very reputable source, say a BBC reporter or something like that.
As for the NAFO stuff... if you're of that opinion, what are you doing here?
This fact is what makes the internet so sensitive to people paid to post. Intelligence services, every huge company, and even medium-sized companies with major PR challenges or opportunities are paying tens or even thousands of people to post. The leverage of 90-9-1 makes them an amazing investment.
This is a thread mode on reddit where answers to a post are hidden by default and scores are masked. I'm not sure how efficient it is at limiting petty internet fights though.
I might be misnaming it, but basically top-level responses are in a random order and child comments are auto-hidden (but can still be expanded). I'm sure there would be some tweaks necessary to make it work for HN, and maybe it includes voting or doesn't.
Quite frankly, for most discussions on those subjects, the black text isn't of a much higher standard than the gray text; they tend to bring out the Dunning-Krugers and the jingoists in equal numbers. I've found that some gray comments have more insightful reasoning than highly upvoted comments, and some gray posts invite more nuanced follow-up discussion that is still worth reading.
What I do on subjects that have already been rehashed to death: I skim/skip the walls of black text and focus primarily on the black-gray checkered threads.
What I really hate is the weaponization of victimhood. Most frequently, you will read about this as "cancel culture", but it goes deeper - IMO. You have obsessive (and terminally online) people that will literally trawl through every public post / tweet / statement / etc. a celebrity has made in their lifetime, and check if there's anything that clashes against their own agendas.
Then, if they find something, they will start a crusade. The problem is that these people live in echo-chambers that are strictly moderated, and will just end up inciting the other extremists.
All of a sudden it sounds like there's a "movement", because these people are spending all day and night sharing links and cross-posting on every relevant forum or social media available. I regularly see this kind of brigading coming from all different kinds of groups - the other day I was reading a local news article regarding the avian flu that's ravaging Europe, and sure enough, a couple of hundred trolls started brigading the comment section with "It's 5G/chemtrails/COVID vaccine/Ukraine/etc." conspiracy takes.
Vocal minorities in real life hold an outsized influence in all sorts of things. Look at things like primary elections where the turnout is low and the people with the strongest or most extreme opinions turn out to vote.
The ROI on content creation and commenting is phenomenal. Anyone with an agenda to push would be dumb to leave that on the table.
The barriers to entry for social media are inconsequential compared to mass media. And to boot, contrived social media disputes are often picked up by mass media who are all to happy to present your side as one of two legitimate positions. You can absolutely garner wide reach with a modicum of effort.
One of the most powerful tools in the arsenal isn't telling people what to believe; it's teaching them how to believe. One or two strong attractors in hermenutical space can be all it takes to give people the ability to perform the type of self-story and current event exegesis that you want them to. From there, it's a self-reinforcing loop. Dropping an interpretative device that makes people feel smart is one of the easiest ways to get your method of belief-construction to dominate.
If "social" media wasn't factually asocial by allowing anonymity, sockpuppet farms at least would have to usurp some real body's identity.
The structure of human society being hierarchical in nature (the 90-9-1 rule mentioned in the article) is a given. Lamenting it, implicitly or explicitly, is nonsensical. Society enacts a marketplace of ideas. Attaching those to persons is sort of a fallacy. Maybe due to the assumption, those with one good idea might have another one. Sometimes that's true though.
So, if some thinktank or company comes up with a good idea, or "hermenutical attractor" in your parlance, that's just fine? So long as nobody has an actually better idea, what's the problem?
The real problem is the lack of discussion space where ideas can be thoroughly compared.
This is a well known effect and there have been a number of attempts to address it.
Slashdot went through a number of iterations. They initially added a points system and ended up adding a meta-moderation layer to try to address biases in the previous layers. https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml
Reddit lets viewers choose from a number of sort algorithms that allow them to emphasize posts other than those most heavily upvoted.
They're all trying to address the issue by offering sort orders which should show the "best" posts at the top.
The fundamental problem with all of these is that they assume that everyone agrees on what is "best" and that small set of sort options will allow the majority of people to choose one which matches their ranking of "best".
We've also seen several large companies provide "algorithms" which provide customized ranking lists for individuals. The glaring problem with these approaches is that they rank by what is "best" for the company, not for the individual.
We've been missing is a way for people to choose sort lists that reflect their own views of what is "best". Otherwise the best we'll be able to get is some sort order that some plurality agrees on, even if that plurality isn't even a majority.
We do have lists that are sorted by your own view of what's best - netflix recommendations, for example, try to put stuff you like in front of you. (Although I'm sure they've been tempted to mess with it as an advertising mechanism by now).
(Just musing here) I've always wanted to try a simple ordering by time, but with each up/downvote adding an offset to the time. So you get 10 downvotes, you get pushed 10 minutes into the past on the timeline. I think that when people get sick of seeing something at the top of their feed they'll flip their upvotes to downvotes, and away it goes. Probably won't work - automated moderation systems don't generally. I'd still be curious to try it though.
But sometime in the last couple decades reporters stopped going outside and started reporting on whatever they saw on twitter, thus creating an irreality feedback loop
I mean, most of the journalists were fired and replaced with social media "content producers" who have done zero journalism because the industry kinda shrunk by like 90% and can't afford to buy actual journalism.
Bit of an aside, but the socially acceptable levels of casual-hate when directed at "white men" is sometimes shocking to me.
> Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters.
The author just takes it as a non-controversial statement of fact that "white men" are inherently evil and that if they support a political candidate that means the candidate is also bad, and that she needs to distance herself from the whole thing.
The story arc isn't that anything changed about Bernie's policy views, history or anything else. The bad thing that happened is a rumor that "young white men" liked him, which was bad, and the good news was that Bernie supporters were actually from the morally good races and genders.
> But then repeated news cycles about “toxic Bernie Bros” seemed to drain the movement’s momentum. Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement.
What I read is a description of how media portrayed Bernie Sander's supporters. Nowhere here does it say that white men are bad. In fact, it's calling out negative stereotyping used by mainstream media. Why do you think the author hates you?
Isn't that the point: Different people read/ hear the same thing but interpret it differently based upon their biases.
"Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement."
Why was their skin color and sex relevant?
If the issue was that they were "cyberbullies", then why does she follow up with this defense:
"Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters."
That is only important if "young white men" are, by definition, A Problem.
I'm so used to it I read right past it, but yeah, on closer inspection if any other race was used in this context or the source material I suspect it'd get cut real quick. And the author doesn't even bother to mince in some quotation marks to baffle the connotations.
> The author just takes it as a non-controversial statement of fact that "white men" are inherently evil and that if they support a political candidate that means the candidate is also bad, and that she needs to distance herself from the whole thing.
No, there's nothing like that in the article. You imposed this strange interpretation on it. After all, Bernie himself is a white man, so why would someone who thinks white men are inherently evil support him, especially when some of the other candidates (e.g., Clinton) were women?
The "Bernie bros" meme was a cynical ploy to undermine the Sanders campaign by trying to show that only sexists would support him over his female opponents (Clinton or Warren).
134 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadSo if the author had done research and used sources, they may not have made a bunch of factual errors.
[0] https://www.capradio.org/articles/2020/03/09/politifact-cali...
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-defines-the-sander...
From the second linked article:
> although it seems Sanders’s base is hardly all white, it’s likely that no matter who wins the nomination ... a clear majority of their votes will probably come from white Democrats
This directly contradicts the original article's quote:
> there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters
Additionally, the article's next sentence:
> The movement, in fact, consisted of a diverse coalition of people from marginalized races and genders
Appears to be an attempt at proving the majority isn't white, but it doesn't support that claim at all. It can be true that there was a diverse coalition of voters, and white people still make up a majority of votes.
Then, of all your three claims, none of them disprove the claim that most Bernie voters are white. Everything you said could be true, but none weaken the claims of the comment you're replying to.
I suspect at least someone here doesnt understand that "60% of Latino voters and 30% of white voters" doesn't imply "white is not the majority vote" (since, for example, 60% of 10 is significantly less than 30% of 1000).
The Swifties cared.
Two close friends of mine, both of them Swifties, went to a The 1975 concert only because Healy had been linked to Taylor Swift. Said two friends live half a world away from the States and hadn't listened to The 1975 at all until all this scandal. They also are totally in the dark when it comes to ct, Adam Friedland or rs.
There seem to be some keywords that trigger a pre-organized group to descend upon a post in New and downvote/report/flag it into oblivion.
There was a piece documenting how easily, and cheaply, it is to manipulate reddit a few years ago. I can't seem to find it now.
I would like to add that sometimes my posts get flagged, such as a recent one complaining of poor writing, and that's fair enough.
meta: hilariously, this piece was flagged while I was writing this comment, so I vouched for it.
If someone could give some reasons why TFA is not interesting and deserves flagging, I would love to hear them.
There is a major temporal component to posts, comments, and flagging. I am not sure what good comes from unflagging my mistakenly flagged items when they are usually at least days old by the time I notice.
Considering the gravity of that particular mechanic, I would argue that something along the lines of the "are you sure?" prompt used in the delete action would be really helpful.
Related issue: it's too easy to accidentally mix up the upvote and downvote actions, because the buttons are close together and the visual feedback after the fact is pretty subtle. This is particularly bad on mobile.
That's what I thought. If you don't mind taking a moment, is there any rational reason by your reading why the linked article would deserve multiple flags on HN?
This may be conspiratorial thinking on my part, but if I was part of an influence voting ring, I would want to make this type of article disappear. If that's the case then the voting (flagging) ring might have just outed themselves to the admins, no?
You can make the tiniest issue seem like a massive global concern without much effort, better yet enlist your friends and you can get the issue trending on other sites too because now lazy orgs have no problem using Reddit as a source. It’s of course not just Reddit, every platform has deep problems with people gaming their prevention systems, bot farms, trading accounts, and so on. That’s before you get into groups/corporations actively trying to push a very specific narrative in an organized effort.
It plays into the second thing I mentioned which was the distortion of numbers. The way we perceive stats online is very interesting, in that 2000 followers is a tiny insignificant thing, but 2000 upvotes is a major thread. This general distortion makes it very difficult imo for people to really grasp when something online is “real”.
So I get why some just opt out and view online life as just a funny thing irrelevant to reality. It’s kind of easier that way.
If you find this to be true, please talk to some normal people & touch grass.
I've seen it happen.
All because they slowly, over years, curated their online experience to the point that they truly believed it reflected some real offline. I'm not a HUGE fan of stand up comedy, but the line, "Twitter isn't a real place" is something people need to fully internalize.
I've seen people in smaller city subreddits try and stand up to these folks, but they end up getting about a dozen downvotes on all their posts. They probably don't have the energy to keep putting up with all the contentiousness and they almost always give up trying to argue and the echo chamber is restored.
On big popular sites like reddit, especially on main sub posts, you can find any opinion you want in the comments. What this means is that if you are pushing an agenda, you don't need to be the originator of the comments/posts. You can use unknowing bystanders to carry your banner for you, giving the content much more legitimacy.
I don't think people understand how pervasive this is. Being able to control upvotes is far more powerful than being able to generate authentic looking accounts with strongly persuasive comments.
with the war in ukraine, for example, i find a huge disconnect about how reality is described in the media and some actions are seen as evident and necessary, and how people in my social circle feel about it...
Submitted post title, as it was for the first 100+ upvotes:
“Vocal minority sets online discourse, distorting real-life perception”
OTOH, if someone reads the article, your comment makes sense, given the section heading:
“A vocal minority sets the agenda”
Her view of Sanders' 2020 bid was that people like herself were a big part of it--even 80 year old Nepalese grandmas were Sanders boosters, after all!
I think what really happened is that Democratic insiders, both in the media and the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring. Why did they engage in this evil plot? Not because they dislike Sanders so much, as because he would have been hopeless in the General.
I don't know. But if you want to study the question, you can see something happen similar right now with a very different politician, RFK jr. The average impression of the guy is "kook" but he's pretty sensible. (I mean, in terms of issues, he's shit, but that's completely irrelevant.)
No. Very much no. We're hiring a politician, not a counselor. His policies are the only thing that's relevant.
The guy seems damn classy to me.
I think she's reasonably questioning to what degree that lack of popularity was constructed by the media hammering certain narratives (like the Bernie Bros narrative) that were later shown to be mostly false.
The point of her article is that narratives in the online world can be generated by a tiny number of people, but can then seem to represent a majority view, come to shape the majority view and create self-fulfilling prophecies.
>...the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring....
I don't disagree that the mainstream media may have hurt him(though I'm not convinced they did). I'm mainly disagreeing that anything bad happened during the primary process with sc and super tuesday.
In a two-party system, massive clout accrues to people who are in the game for the longest time. Offices, lobbyists, donors, name recognition. Prior to the advances of the modern medicine, natural aging would push back against this trend. But now we are seeing ever more old people in positions of power.
It is somewhat better in Europe (Sunak and Macron are relatively young, so is Zelensky), but America seems to be very susceptible to that - not just in politics, in business, too (the average age of Fortune 500 CEOs increased a lot since 2000).
Something else has changed.
The idea that Bernie's loss is because he "wasn't that popular" withers under the fact that Biden won the election. Biden wasn't even popular among Democratic Party insiders, they just 1) had no leverage to make him stop his campaign, and 2) their preferred candidates like Harris and Buttigieg were far more repulsive to the public than Biden.
The fairness of voting, auctions, etc. wither under collusion.
The reason Biden wasn't popular among insiders is that they didn't think he could win. People like Obama specifically declined to endorse anyone until the winner was clear so that he wouldn't bias the outcomes and hurt their chances in the general. They fell in line when they saw Biden win the primaries.
Bernie losing could be explained by him simply not being popular. Trump was in a similar position, but trashed the Republican primaries because he was genuinely popular.
If you think the idea that politicians were colluding with each other (or cooperating for a more neutral word) is conspiratorial then you should just be disqualified from this conversation.
Not to mention that his cohort of rabid online supporters were as insufferable as those supporting the orange man; thus giving his campaign a similar kool aid drinking cult vibe.
As far as the talk about other candidates forming a coalition against him … that whole line of argument is pretty laughable. This is politics. Success in politics is achieved by building coalitions among constituencies and their representatives to advance policy.
If Bernie were such an effective politician then why was he unable to get someone else to stay in the primary to split the establishment vote?
Listen to how ridiculous this sounds. He was so “unpopular“ that the moderates needed to circle the wagons against him in order to make him lose.
But I get where the "more popular among both" myth comes from. Loads of right wingers talked him up because they think this is their clever divide and conquer approach, and it is simply amazing that anyone actually falls for. It's the same way the guy above -- a guy who a couple of days ago was commenting on here about the Democratic party deep state in the federal government trying to railroad poor innocent Trump -- talks up RFK Jr. That absolute nutter RFK Jr gets 100% of his airtime by the far right who have made him their current Bernie. He's their Token "Democrat", now that Tulsi Gabbard has gone so far off the far right deep end that she can't play the part anymore.
Your assumption seems to be that people's political preferences fall on a single dimension dictated by the Establishment's Overton Window. I see now reason to assume that.
Noam Chomsky has gotten standing ovations in places like deeply rural and xenophobic California. Even though he's an anarchist.
(Sanders' policy preferences, on the other end, aren't even far left—they're only “far left” because the Overton Window of American politics is far right.)
> But I get where the "more popular among both" myth comes from. Loads of right wingers talked him up because they think this is their clever divide and conquer approach, and it is simply amazing that anyone actually falls for.
I hate how people denigrate "conspiracy theories". Of course people can conspire: a small group of people with a lot of power can definitely get together in smoke-filled backrooms.
But this theory of yours is much more unlikely: a lot of right-wingers seemingly organically cheering on people like Bernie Sanders in order to divide-and-conquer the Left (whatever "the Left" is). That kind of mass astroturfing is much harder to pull off.
What's more likely? That many right-wingers simply like Sanders, or that thousands of them got together and decided to, against all of their instincts, fake enthusiasm in public in order to own-the-libs?
There are many dimensions, from healthcare to social security to immigration to wealth redistribution to law and order to "backing the blue" to the military to taxes, and on all of them Bernie is the absolutely diametric opposite of Trump. The idea that if Bernie were the candidate people would switch their vote from Trump to Bernie is simply preposterous, and I am in awe that anyone actually fell for this. On the flip side if Bernie were the candidate it would have been incredibly easy for the right to fear-monger and denigrate.
And regarding the definitions of left and right, clearly this is in the context of the US.
>What's more likely? That many right-wingers simply like Sanders, or that thousands of them got together and decided to, against all of their instincts, fake enthusiasm in public in order to own-the-libs?
You surely realize that "loving the adversary of my most potent adversary" (e.g. the enemy of my enemy is my friend) is like a fundamental human trait, right? That it is seen across society, for the duration of mankind's existence. From geopolitics, to sports, to billionaires and MMA matches. This is a foundational human trait.
The "right" tends to be more engaged and ego-attached to politics, so their machinations in this regard tend to be much, much louder.
I am such a person, and back then there were plenty of others who expressed similar sentiments. All it takes for you to be literally incorrect is two people.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
There are loads of situations where people try to rationalize their own behavior through mechanisms like this.
Two fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods and says "Morning boys. How's the water?" The younger fish beat the older fish to death and take his wallet. "He should have known I'm allergic to water!" one lamented. "He made me do that".
Convenient for some (roughly: the better off), not so convenient for others.
>Suddenly you could pat yourself on the back, convince yourself that your hand was forced.
Provided one has an adequately powerful imagination I suppose.
>There are loads of situations where people try to rationalize their own behavior through mechanisms like this.
Or their beliefs!
> Two fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods and says "Morning boys. How's the water?" The younger fish beat the older fish to death and take his wallet. "He should have known I'm allergic to water!" one lamented. "He made me do that".
I'm not sure I understand the anecdote, could you explain?
This narrative (not good for the General) is of course their preferred one. But I am not inclined to take them on their word when they chose to smear him with a “red herring” (your words) in the first place.
The 2016 election was when people started complaining about Populism, and both Trump and Sanders were populists in rhetoric, although very different in their substance. But the Dems would still have us believe that a non-populist, completely Establishment candidate (Clinton) was what the Dems needed for the General.
The more likely explanation is that the Dems would rather lose rather than run with a social democratic candidate.
Their behavior does suggest this. It's why they're propping up an octogenarian who is one "senior moment" away from handing the presidency to the other party.
"Electability" was a ruse in 2016 and 2020 that they no longer need to keep up.
"Nah, I'm not really into Pokémon."
Whether these are issues manufactured or not, they translate into real fears that play out across many people, in profound ways. It’s important to be engaged to protect people in fear, whether you share their backgrounds or beliefs - because we all can share an understanding of fear, and hopefully none of us wish it on others.
The majority reads what these journalists write. If it seems reasonable, they'll accept it. When they're browbeaten, they'll also accept it, but with a grudge. But don't forget that there are different political, religous and cultural leanings in all media, so the majority is not uniform. Silent they are, though.
There are some outlets, like The Intercept, that are still doing great investigative work, but they get drowned out among the other options, which isn't surprising when so few people own so much of the most popular new outlets.
All that is old school now and replaced by the quick drug-like hit of posting "so-and-so tweeted". It's enough to write about a post of some kind and not actually get comments or context from anybody else, because there always posts for "opponents say" or "advocates say".
I was a web developer for a newspaper and knew they were doomed when they started writing articles about their own comments section.
Implication and notoriety rule the day.
Having actually been the subject of news stories a few times (appearing in multiple papers each time), I doubt that. Journalists managed to shuffle quotes around people, e.g. putting my words in someone else’s mouth or someone else’s in mine, or creatively edited what I said and hence distorting it (published inside double quotes of course), even though I gave all of them a printed document of everything I said in the interview and more.
Yes, of course, that’s what it’s like for the other side. Those people are all bad. We on the correct side don’t have that problem. /s
https://commsrisk.com/250-simboxes-seized-by-ukraine-raids-o...
The only country where people are abducted from the streets to be sent to the front is in Russia, and in Russian occupied territory.
I don't think the numerous such videos I saw were fake, and them being used by Russian propaganda didn't make them any less real.
> no, there are no 'abductions' by the Ukrainian army,
[1] January 2023
[2] June 2023
[3] July 2023
[4] Three days ago, the beginning of August 2023
And these are just the most "famous".
On a more general note, it doesn't surprise me that the audience of this forum is the prime target of NAFO-like thinking, to the contrary.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/10ijxa...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/13xq6d...
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/14zbeo...
[4] https://twitter.com/dana916/status/1687531854537097228
As for the NAFO stuff... if you're of that opinion, what are you doing here?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vocal%20mino...
Submitted post title, as it was for the first 100+ upvotes:
“Vocal minority sets online discourse, distorting real-life perception”
- Global warming
- Anything about the environment really
- Elon Musk
- Bitcoin
- Energy
- PHP
- Education
The list seems to be continuing to grow over time, and some seem to be intentionally working to trigger HN's flamewar filter in many of the threads.
This is a thread mode on reddit where answers to a post are hidden by default and scores are masked. I'm not sure how efficient it is at limiting petty internet fights though.
Back to your point, I've seen a change of mind on this forum regarding PHP in the last couple of years, but that could just be me.
What I do on subjects that have already been rehashed to death: I skim/skip the walls of black text and focus primarily on the black-gray checkered threads.
Then, if they find something, they will start a crusade. The problem is that these people live in echo-chambers that are strictly moderated, and will just end up inciting the other extremists.
All of a sudden it sounds like there's a "movement", because these people are spending all day and night sharing links and cross-posting on every relevant forum or social media available. I regularly see this kind of brigading coming from all different kinds of groups - the other day I was reading a local news article regarding the avian flu that's ravaging Europe, and sure enough, a couple of hundred trolls started brigading the comment section with "It's 5G/chemtrails/COVID vaccine/Ukraine/etc." conspiracy takes.
The barriers to entry for social media are inconsequential compared to mass media. And to boot, contrived social media disputes are often picked up by mass media who are all to happy to present your side as one of two legitimate positions. You can absolutely garner wide reach with a modicum of effort.
One of the most powerful tools in the arsenal isn't telling people what to believe; it's teaching them how to believe. One or two strong attractors in hermenutical space can be all it takes to give people the ability to perform the type of self-story and current event exegesis that you want them to. From there, it's a self-reinforcing loop. Dropping an interpretative device that makes people feel smart is one of the easiest ways to get your method of belief-construction to dominate.
The structure of human society being hierarchical in nature (the 90-9-1 rule mentioned in the article) is a given. Lamenting it, implicitly or explicitly, is nonsensical. Society enacts a marketplace of ideas. Attaching those to persons is sort of a fallacy. Maybe due to the assumption, those with one good idea might have another one. Sometimes that's true though.
So, if some thinktank or company comes up with a good idea, or "hermenutical attractor" in your parlance, that's just fine? So long as nobody has an actually better idea, what's the problem?
The real problem is the lack of discussion space where ideas can be thoroughly compared.
Anonymity is, in fact, a real necessity:
<https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...>
Slashdot went through a number of iterations. They initially added a points system and ended up adding a meta-moderation layer to try to address biases in the previous layers. https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml
Reddit lets viewers choose from a number of sort algorithms that allow them to emphasize posts other than those most heavily upvoted.
Lemmy uses a log scale to try to bring more voices to a conversation after the initial "New" votes come in. https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.htm...
They're all trying to address the issue by offering sort orders which should show the "best" posts at the top. The fundamental problem with all of these is that they assume that everyone agrees on what is "best" and that small set of sort options will allow the majority of people to choose one which matches their ranking of "best".
We've also seen several large companies provide "algorithms" which provide customized ranking lists for individuals. The glaring problem with these approaches is that they rank by what is "best" for the company, not for the individual.
We've been missing is a way for people to choose sort lists that reflect their own views of what is "best". Otherwise the best we'll be able to get is some sort order that some plurality agrees on, even if that plurality isn't even a majority.
(Just musing here) I've always wanted to try a simple ordering by time, but with each up/downvote adding an offset to the time. So you get 10 downvotes, you get pushed 10 minutes into the past on the timeline. I think that when people get sick of seeing something at the top of their feed they'll flip their upvotes to downvotes, and away it goes. Probably won't work - automated moderation systems don't generally. I'd still be curious to try it though.
But sometime in the last couple decades reporters stopped going outside and started reporting on whatever they saw on twitter, thus creating an irreality feedback loop
The media has been pretending the internet is real life (so they can write lazy articles) for so long that they've forgotten it's not.
> Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters.
The author just takes it as a non-controversial statement of fact that "white men" are inherently evil and that if they support a political candidate that means the candidate is also bad, and that she needs to distance herself from the whole thing.
The story arc isn't that anything changed about Bernie's policy views, history or anything else. The bad thing that happened is a rumor that "young white men" liked him, which was bad, and the good news was that Bernie supporters were actually from the morally good races and genders.
> But then repeated news cycles about “toxic Bernie Bros” seemed to drain the movement’s momentum. Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement.
What I read is a description of how media portrayed Bernie Sander's supporters. Nowhere here does it say that white men are bad. In fact, it's calling out negative stereotyping used by mainstream media. Why do you think the author hates you?
Isn't that the point: Different people read/ hear the same thing but interpret it differently based upon their biases.
"Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement."
Why was their skin color and sex relevant?
If the issue was that they were "cyberbullies", then why does she follow up with this defense:
"Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters."
That is only important if "young white men" are, by definition, A Problem.
No, there's nothing like that in the article. You imposed this strange interpretation on it. After all, Bernie himself is a white man, so why would someone who thinks white men are inherently evil support him, especially when some of the other candidates (e.g., Clinton) were women?
The "Bernie bros" meme was a cynical ploy to undermine the Sanders campaign by trying to show that only sexists would support him over his female opponents (Clinton or Warren).