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How Twitter poisoned politics

prospectmagazine.co.uk

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Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#121

Post by moorhosj »

rrggrr wrote: post #22

Media criticism of Twitter is suspect. If the Weinstein case in the US has demonstrated anything, it is that news is itself a currency that can be traded, hoarded and deployed to accumulate and wield power. Twitter is one of several welcome checks and balances against that practice, with hopefully more to follow.

==news is itself a currency that can be traded, hoarded and deployed to accumulate and wield power. Twitter is one of several welcome checks and balances against that practice, with hopefully more to follow.==

Except Twitter can be used to accumulate and wield power just the same. There are clearly bots on the platform trying to push certain narratives and bury others.

==Twitter has admitted that more than 50,000 Russia-linked accounts used its service to post automated material about the 2016 US election== [1]

How is that better?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-a...

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#122

Post by [deleted] »

chasd00 wrote: post #111
hnruss wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's classic divide and conquer. The ultra rich have framed politics as red vs. blue, when in reality it has always been (and always will be): them vs. the rest of us.

i remember during the financial crisis thinking if only the tea party and the occupy crowd realized they were two sides to the same coin maybe something great could have happened. I feel like that dawned on the powers-that-be and the old divide and conquer technique was quickly applied; tea party turned far right, occupy turned far left and they've been fighting ever sense.

[deleted]

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#123

Post by irrational »

slg wrote: post #79
ordinaryperson wrote: post #34

Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral. And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective. Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputa…

Politics may never have been pure and things today aren't as bad as they were at certain points in human history, but I am honestly surprised that people here aren't recognizing that there has been a pretty stark change in how politics have been progressing in the last decade versus the several previous decades. The polarization has increased drastically and the civility of political discourse and faith in institutio…

From what I've read, the time after the World Wars was an aberration and we are now returning to the norm.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#125

Post by jeffwass »

mwfunk wrote: post #92

Politics has always reflected poorly on humanity, but the existence of Twitter, Facebook, etc. these days have basically brought Usenet to the masses. Not good Usenet either- bad Usenet, after it was overrun by spammers and trolls. There’s a truism that the people who talk the most have the least to say. In the 90s you could witness newsgroups slowly get taken over by such people. They went from places where people i…

It’s worse than the bad usenet because social media curated the content you engage with into a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop.

Eg, my twitter feed shows me tweets of similar themes to those that I recently engage with. The more I engage the more that theme dominates my feed.

So it’s easy to see that someone who engages with tweets of any partisan political commentary can easily get pulled deeper and deeper into that murk with an echo chamber that filters out the opposing viewpoints.

Besides politics the same can happen with conspiracy theories and religious zealotry.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#126

Post by jdoliner »

slg wrote: post #79
ordinaryperson wrote: post #34

Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral. And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective. Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputa…

Politics may never have been pure and things today aren't as bad as they were at certain points in human history, but I am honestly surprised that people here aren't recognizing that there has been a pretty stark change in how politics have been progressing in the last decade versus the several previous decades. The polarization has increased drastically and the civility of political discourse and faith in institutio…

It's interesting that you say this would be unthinkable a couple decades ago when it seems, on the face of it, that it's pretty similar to the Clarence Thomas confirmation process in 1991. Do you see them as distinctly different?

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#127

Post by [deleted] »

slg wrote: post #79
ordinaryperson wrote: post #34

Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral. And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective. Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputa…

Politics may never have been pure and things today aren't as bad as they were at certain points in human history, but I am honestly surprised that people here aren't recognizing that there has been a pretty stark change in how politics have been progressing in the last decade versus the several previous decades. The polarization has increased drastically and the civility of political discourse and faith in institutio…

[deleted]

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#128

Post by evan_ »

bliblah wrote: post #80
slg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics may never have been pure and things today aren't as bad as they were at certain points in human history, but I am honestly surprised that people here aren't recognizing that there has been a pretty stark change in how politics have been progressing in the last decade versus the several previous decades. The polarization has increased drastically and the civility of political discourse and faith in institutio…

I think this is the issue; at least in the U.S. EVERYTHING is becoming more politicized no matter how inane. You are also EXPECTED to have a binary opinion on all these issues with no room for differing opinions. Look at the NFL protests during the anthem. Kneel and you are a bleeding heart liberal that hates the cops. Stand and you are a red hat conservative promoting police brutality and the Private Prison Complex.…

> Stand and you are a red hat conservative promoting police brutality and the Private Prison Complex.

Nobody is saying this

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#129

Post by michaelbuckbee »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #34

Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral. And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective. Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputa…

I think there are two real structural changes to how the political system is configured that have led to an increase in partisanship.

First: Gerrymandering [1] - as districts have become more and more solid for either party it naturally results in candidates with a less centrist view. A couple decades ago the candidates being elected often to win voters from both sides to get elected. Now that we have many more situations where it's 80%+ party dominance in a district we get more extreme people representing us.

Second: Demographic shifts in apportionment [2]. We sort of take for granted that we have a fixed number (435) of representatives spread across the states and 2 senators per state. But this wasn't always the case, originally it was 1 representative per 30,000. If we followed this through to today we'd have 10,000 representatives. This plus the growing urban vs rural divide (which was the reason we halted the growth in representatives anyway) all contribute to the greater divide.

I point this out because structural issues like this are fixable in a way that throwing up our hands and saying: "politics always has been bad" does not.

1- https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2017/07/06/a-pr...

2 - https://www.census.gov/population/apportionment/about/histor...

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#130

Post by genericone »

crooked-v wrote: post #115
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All right, lets go back just a bit further - to Watergate. The House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon. One member called his wife, said that they had voted to impeach, and then started crying . This was one of the Representatives who voted in favor of impeachment, crying (I believe) because it was a tragedy for the country as a whole that it had come to this. I can't imagine that, if the Democrats win the e…

No one in Washington would cry about Trump being impeached because Trump has done literally nothing with the Presidency that would earn respect from anyone. Even his own party sees him as little but a seat-filler who's only useful because he picks appointees along party lines.

Literally nothing that would earn respect?

If something that Trump did that was good was considered revenue, and something he did that was bad was considered costs, you're saying that it has all been costs? Or do you mean that in your view his profits = revenue - costs has been negative? I'm sure you can go around the country and DC and find plenty of people who think Trump has earned revenue, so to speak, even if they think he's a net negative.

Anyway, the points are all subjective, so no-one can balance the books but each individual voter.

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