I travel a lot, and talk to a lot of different people. I’ve noticed that while people certainly do have differing opinions, it’s not as extreme as what I see online. I’m starting to feel like all this hate and division is manufactured. Has anyone else noticed, that when you actually talk to real people things are far less divided than various media would have you believe?
I talk to people who are against corruption, against racism, believe the medical industry is broken, monopolies are bad, etc. Seems we agree on a lot of basic principles yet they are still voting trump tho. WTF?
Yes appears most people have a lot more common ground than it they would expect, but everyone is convinced their candidate is the way to best fix things. I believe this is why there is so much focus on social issues like what bathroom people should use instead harder things to fix like monopolies.
The biggest difference btwn the parties is one is still down playing climate change caused by global warming, and that is objectively wrong.
There is a lot of people manipulating internet discussions. It doesn’t take much to detail and entire thread. Idon’t see it much on Lemmy but it’s common on Twitter and reddit.
It can be seen throughout the lemmyworld politics sub if one wants to find an example.
puts on tinfoil hat I honestly think it’s because most of the hateful stuff you see online is posted by bots.
That’s completely untrue, you piece of beep beep boop!
I’m starting to feel like all this hate and division is manufactured
Even putting aside biases or conspiracies, mass media and (for-profit) social media has an economic incentive to get people passionate and interested and viewing more ads. So there are systematic factors at play, which I’d say are enhanced by digital technology.
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I’ve always been fascinated with the Holocaust and so when there was an interview with a Holocaust survivor on 60 minutes, I had to watch it. The woman said a bunch of stuff, but what stuck with me is that she said that, “people need to be given permission” to act badly. The episode showed previously undiscovered notes and pictures from one camp, showing officers having a picnic and enjoying themselves after a hard day of???
Her point was that these people were given permission. I now see it everywhere. Food fight in the school cafeteria? There were a few instigators who gave permission to the rest. A city protest that turns violent? Again, a few vocal minority of the group started the violence and then the rest joined in. I see it at work and I also see it on-line. Anonymity and lack of accountability also enhances the effect.
Whether the instigators are real or bots doesn’t really matter because they “gave permission” to the rest to misbehave.
Found the episode: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pictures-show-nazi-life-at-auschwitz-as-jews-died-in-gas-chambers-60-minutes/
This is the comment that gave me the most to think about. I don’t have anything to add, I just wanted to let you know I appreciate it.
There’s a couple of different ways to think about this. When I was younger, I thought it so unfair that gay people couldn’t get married, and I didn’t know any mixed race marriages in my parents friends or my friends parents; women were still sort of oppressed, there wasn’t great birth control even.
So I guess conservatives didn’t have much to complain about; there were still scary rednecks around but that didn’t feel political.
A lot of these things have been fixed now, but the people who saw the discrimination of the past as some sort of natural order are complaining about it.
So there were protests and all throughout my life but until recently they were people wanting progress, to fix inequality and discrimination.
Now that a lot of these things are mainstream accepted A-OK, the conservatives think it’s time for the pendulum to swing back, but that doesn’t make sense to most of us. I do have plenty of friends who are like that but we can’t debate politics, it’s not any nicer than online. Outside of the wacko beliefs they are fine, we connect in other ways around things we agree on and all of the kids are progressive so I think it’s a limited time problem.
all of the kids are progressive
I’m not so sure that’s entirely true, there are plenty of angry social regressives among the young too.
Well, all of ours are. And at least there isn’t the tacit acceptance of ‘how it is’ so much anymore. I just always take comfort in the fact that the 3 men over 50 and 1 grandma may be voting regressive but me and 13 more offset them, between our kids and their partners. Plus one other grandma.
I’m currently on family vacation for a week. If someone were to bring up Trump or Israel or reproductive rights, there would be arguments and probably some hurt feelings. So no one is mentioning them. It’s not that none of us hold strong opinions, it’s that we’re not making politics the focus of every moment and every interaction when our goal is to spend some time as a family.
Just like if I were to meet a random person like you in the real world, Trump would not be my go-to casual conversation topic.
Here online, I’m generally intentionally looking for political topics.
I feel like people online are just more honest. Easier to do that looking at a computer screen than if you’re interacting with a flesh-and-blood person.
This is a good point. The pseudonymous internet is like a confessional booth. I can bluntly say all my political beliefs here with little-to-no consequence that I can’t solve by registering a new account. There’s no risk of alienating a friend or family member who disagrees. As an extreme case, I’ve met a couple of people online who can be legally killed for their political views (e.g. not following the state religion). So the internet can provide more comfort in free expression and therefore more people arguing over differences.
It’s important to get offline and go touch grass from time to time. If you are getting your view of the world through FaceBook or Twitter, you’re getting a very warped view of the world. People are pretty horrible online. This was well recognized 20 years ago:
As Capitalism continues to decay, and disparity continues to rise, both progressive and reactionary groups enlargen as the unsustainability of the status quo becomes more apparent. This is represented by a rise in fascism and Socialism.
@Thespiralsong @asklemmy look up “normal distribution” for details but.
The normal distribution of any opinion will naturally show that the largest number are BETWEEN extremes. As in, in the middle. So for the majority of people and the majority of issues people will find that half of their concerns are addressed by one party and the other half by the other party.
The most extreme views are just yelled the loudest.But echo chambers and polarization can increase the standard deviation, bringing down the opinions in the middle. Now may topics might even be a bimodal distribution rather than a normal distribution.
Your local opinion, even in a neighboring country, barely differs from another, but internationally via the internet, you are confronted with many more people. Also the internet is mostly bots by now with an agenda.
Not really. Seems to be a firm split in my area. IRL seems just as divided as online.
Nah not really. It was very bomby and gunny in the 20th century, now it seems mostly chill.
as someone who was among those early to point out the incoming dangers of bots manipulating discussion,
i’ve recently begun to think i’ve massively underestimated the extent and breadth of bot manipulation of public perception
