Man... just wow. My immediate impression of this was how great the divide is on media between the left and the right. I don't know how much of this is attributable to standard ad targeting, some facebook interest algorithm or what, but man, the divide is huge.
My second impression here though is perhaps the more impactful -- most of what I'm seeing is just ugly, ugly headlines, and in both the red and blue columns. I don't know what I did right in my life that these headlines aren't currently the kind that I'm seeing in my news and Facebook feeds, but thank heavens I did it.
It's really no wonder that people are mad about things -- these headlines are basically begging them to be.
And Facebook emphasizes the headline keeping the person who shared it and the actual source relatively obscured. 99% of people only see the picture and the headline.
If you read the "methodology" they explain this isn't example feeds of what a left-inclined or right-inclined person would see, this is instead a sample of "most shared from sources tagged very right" and "most shared from sources tagged very left".
This really isn't "what a right wing person sees on facebook".
This is an awesome project, and the type of thing I hope we continue to see more of from high profile media outlets throughout the United States. Using data visualization to break down the issues that divide is an a very concrete way, and help expose our very fractured country to the range of voices yelling in their own echo chambers. Excellent work WSJ.
Andrew Sullivan wrote a good piece a few months ago related to this [1]:
>What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse. The process had its origins in partisan talk radio at the end of the past century. The rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.
>So much of this was welcome. I relished it myself in the early aughts, starting a blog and soon reaching as many readers, if not more, as some small magazines do. Fusty old-media institutions, grown fat and lazy, deserved a drubbing. The early independent blogosphere corrected facts, exposed bias, earned scoops. And as the medium matured, and as Facebook and Twitter took hold, everyone became a kind of blogger. In ways no 20th-century journalist would have believed, we all now have our own virtual newspapers on our Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter timelines — picking stories from countless sources and creating a peer-to-peer media almost completely free of editing or interference by elites. This was bound to make politics more fluid. Political organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.
There's an interesting discussion to be had about this. It feels counterintuitive to say that more democracy and more equality is bad, but at least in media I think it's proving to be true. I think liberal democracy is going to be challenged going forward all over the world because of this and it may be difficult for many societies to stay that way.
The problem now is information overload. Effectively we've gone from less information, to good information, to too much information causing overload leading to less information. This makes it easy for bubbles to form by various biases.
Similar arguments were made for why the clergy should conduct prayers in latin and why literacy isn't important.
You can't just take information away or try to "curate" the information seen, that's what censorship is.
We just need to learn to live in a world where everyone knows too much about others and where it can be difficult to tell the difference between truth and lie.
Agreed, the skill to differentiate good and bad sources and get your world view from a combined set of sources, each having their own (known and accounted for biases) is key.
IMO, the problem is that media decentralisation has led to responsibility decentralisation. When a newspaper or news broadcast gets a story wrong, it in itself is a massive story. When a little known blog does, it isn't noticed. So we end up where we are today, where accuracy and reliability die through little mini chips at the rock over time.
Recently towards the end of the election I went through my feed blocking various news sites from even appearing; left or right, but especially many of the sites found in the link above.
That being said, seeing the sites from the link above, it seems like there are more tabloid/fake sites being shared by the conservative side of the isle. I wonder if this has anything to do with those Macedonians and similar people that took advantage of the fearmongering of Trump to make a profit or if those sites have always been around.
> That being said, seeing the sites from the link above, it seems like there are more tabloid/fake sites being shared by the conservative side of the isle.
I noticed this too. The percentage of verified news sources is very low on the conservative feed.
There was a story in BuzzFeed a couple days ago about how there are like 140 fake conservative news sites all basically run by teenagers out of a single Macedonian town. For Adsense revenue.
There was talk recently about how "a lot of Macedonian teenagers" were creating clickbait fake news sites to make a dime on Facebook. They figured out the formula that excited a certain cohort into lots of shares & clicks and they used it to make ad money.
Here's the thing: anyone who uses this site knows that algorithmic ranking systems are gameable. There are some protections against individuals or small groups repeatedly gaming the system, but Facebook has put a profit motive behind it. That, and stopping all of /pol/, or the 280,000 members from /r/The_Donald is not so easy.
A time-travelling variant of these feeds would be fascinating. If the UK is anything to go by, the election result will see the quality of the news in these feeds jet-propelled into an abyss. I don't know if terms of service or copyright prevent archival of the feeds.
A portion of the media will conflate the idea that many racists would have voted for Donald Trump with the simplistic idea that most who voted trump are racist. Looking at the blue feed, that happened some time ago.
Next, opportunists on the other side will seize this and present the now non-controversial idea that white supremacy won, everybody else are sore losers and should get over it. Of course, the truth is much more complicated than that and you end up with a minority that would do harm believing that they are a vindicated majority, and many of the harmless majority will believe this too. Looking at the red feed, we're already at the sore losers, get over it stage.
Just as the polls got Brexit wrong, most got this election wrong. Yet in the UK, the media continue to report any opinion poll result that agrees with their own editorial perspective. What we end up with in the UK is not the will of the people, but a perverted variant of it.
I think the deeper problem boils down to the fact that many people do not want to be under-represented, but have no problem with being over-represented -- both in policy decisions and media coverage -- without acknowledging that they felt under-represented because they felt others were over-represented.
> I think the deeper problem boils down to the fact that many people do not want to be under-represented, but have no problem with being over-represented -- both in policy decisions and media coverage -- without acknowledging that they felt under-represented because they felt others were over-represented.
Facebook is a distraction and a waste of time, like watching too much TV. Stop blaming Facebook and take a look in the mirror. Turn off your computers, put down your phones, and read a god damn history book for a change people.
I'm going to blow your mind here: You can read a history book and your facebook feed. They're not mutually exclusive (crazy, I know).
And please stop blaming people for doing essentially what they want. If a very, very large amount of people are doing what they shouldn't be doing, the overall system is broken. This is why we have laws, instead of simply politely asking people to stop killing each other. It's why we have regulations, instead of nicely asking companies not to dump toxic waste into their backyards.
Right now, a huge amount of media is optimized for ads instead of information and it's actively harmful to our lives. This isn't a problem that'll get resolved by nicely asking the media to stop doing what it's been doubling down on for the past decade.
"History is written by the victors." - Winston Churchill
Either way it is difficult to have a good perspective on anything. I am quite saddened that internet was mean to openly share idea but its users are turning it into their own personal AOL.
How are the history books supposed to compete with something we spend millions of dollars on every year optimizing its appeal? Self control isn't exactly a human strong suit.
facebook is a tool that can be used or misused. Create a list and add forty high quality sources. If you try, with a little effort to sift signal from noise, facebook can be a valuable part of a healthy news diet.
I'm in the (unusual?) spot of almost exclusively seeing things in my feed from the "other" camp. That's because all my friends are on the opposite spectrum of the political compass. I actually think that's worse than only seeing things you agree with. It makes me more polarized in my views.
There seem to be a lot of headlines on the "conservative" side that take pleasure in the dismay of "liberals". I have seen this crop up on Reddit and 4chan in comments too.
Some examples:
"Here's some more incredible news that's sure to drive liberals even crazier."
"Liberal heads will explode in 3....2....1...."
"The amount of butt-hurt following Donald Trump's win has been insane"
Not sure I have any conclusions yet, just an observation.
The liberals are a kind of politically oppressed demographic and cultural majority. Conservatives enjoy the sensation of lording their control of the political sphere over liberals. It's validation of their position that nothing else is currently providing them.
I think it might have something to do with the right being absolutely (and not always fairly) demonized by the media over the course of this election cycle. You can expect schadenfreude for a little while. The left certainly engaged in the same in 2008 and 2012.
anyone didn't know this is how ALL these sites work... just doesn't care about facts, or the news... or the world even. if you care... you check facts... if you don't... then you don't check.
A being a space where someone is free to express themselves. For the right, whether you agree with them or not, that space was no longer the mainstream.
By labeling yours a "safe space" and theirs as "hate space" you are part of the problem.
I really want to agree with you, but glancing over the red feed, a ton of it does look like a hate space, far more than in the blue feed.
Clicking "Hillary Clinton" for example displays an article about "raining down on Iran", an article about "butt-hurt muslims", an article furious about a possible presidential pardon for Hillary, one about "Hillary's Sick Scheme to Get Off Scot-Free", and one that says "People Have to Die - Hillary Clinton Supporter Calls for Violence".
Comparatively, in the Blue feed for Donald Trump, I only see two "hate" articles: one misclassified as blue about a man getting beaten and one about "hate rapidly spreading across america". The rest is about Warren, ACLU support, Donald Trump visiting the white house, and "grieving for the nation".
Most of the articles on both feeds are garbage. I get a feeling not using Facebook day to day and sticking to just people I actually know in the friend list has been a godsend. Even my Twitter feed was awful the day of the election.
Note emphasis. More explicitly stated: the "safe space" that was invented/demanded by the left is why the algorithm created a "hate space" for the right. The red never asked for hate, it is what the left fed them.
Not correctly listening to your opponents' arguments is the actual problem here. Regurgitating arguments is the problem here. Presumption about another person's stance is the problem here. This is exactly how the working class in America got angry and voted. They were screaming to be heard and all they got is "you are part of the problem. Shut up, you are in my safe space."
As it turns out, the notion of having a "safe space" is as bad a "hate space," because in the end both are hate spaces.
Exactly. That's kind of the point of free speech to begin with, at least in part. If a person can only express oneself in a specific zone, you end up with bottled emotions, ideas and frustrations boiling over by the time the arrive.
Combine that with the generalization that occurs on the more polarizing subjects (life/choice, guns, violence, police, race. . .) It snowballs.
Especially in a culture where there is a fear of expressing an opinion such as 'my body, my life' or 'all lives matter’ or ‘guns don't kill, people do' will often result in hate from acquaintances and strangers .
As a society, I think we're are still learning how to deal with the idea that anyone can say something with the potential to be seen by the masses, and be responded to in kind -and en masse.
My second impression here though is perhaps the more impactful -- most of what I'm seeing is just ugly, ugly headlines, and in both the red and blue columns. I don't know what I did right in my life that these headlines aren't currently the kind that I'm seeing in my news and Facebook feeds, but thank heavens I did it.
It's really no wonder that people are mad about things -- these headlines are basically begging them to be.