A Quinnipiac University poll asked U.S. registered voters to select one of four options to blame for the divisions in the country. Overall, 35 percent blamed social media, 32 percent blamed political leaders, 28 percent blamed cable news channels and only 1 percent blamed other countries.
Dunno man, seems like it might be the fascists.
There’s some research to back it up. Social media has made it extremely easy for bad actors to run effective disinformation campaigns with very little effort on their part.
That and platforms that passively protect them while actively suppressing anyone calling them out, which is to say, all of them.
So it’s fascist infighting then.
This shit’s been going on since the civil war. There was no Facebook in the 60s but somehow JFK, RFK, MLK were all assassinated. This is nothing new. Social media just brings it into the daylight.
What does any of that have to do with disinformation campaigns being easier with social media?
I think they might had meant that people had been divided since before social media. To me it just seems they were keeping to the main topic of the post. So maybe they were debating that statement.
The headline says that young people blame social media for divisions in the US. I am pointing out that these divisions have always been here since before social media and that the “young people” point of view (which I doubt is an accurate portrayal) is naive. Phyllis Schlafely used to send out southern strategy-centered newsletters in the 70s for example.
The country is far more polarized than it has been since the 1850s and 60s. This is an objective fact.
I kinda guessed that was what you were saying.
I agree with you, but there is a greater subtext here that social media has made it easier than ever to make money by driving a wedge harder than ever into that split. Same split, but this makes the old tactics look pretty quaint. IMHO.
Ah, yeah, that’s probably right.
Seems like one side wants to feed and educate kids on tax payer dollars while the other one wants to install a dictatorship.
Hasn’t child poverty skyrocketed under this child friendly side? As well as child labour?
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Who use social media to spread influence.
Maybe. Although the hill is a center leaning news site ranked by allsidesm not necessarily right leaning, although it wouldn’t hurt to look into the leanings of the university that did the actual survey.
It seems that some of the choices offered were pretty limited, seemed government was limited to it as government at a whole not specific sides of the government. That may had confused them even more and made them to beleive it was social media more than the government, and possibly why less people picked that choice. That or they liked what the government is currently doing and didn’t want to pick that choice because of how simplified the choice was.
…who own the media. Like Rupert Murdoch and David Zaslav.
dispite common believe, you still have choices for news. however you can’t just sort them by the names outright anymore but by either who owns them, or which corperation owns them.
I wasn’t insinuating otherwise, I was mostly just joking because they said “seems like it might be the fascists” and I was simply pointing out, yes, yes it is. The fascists who own news media companies, which thankfully isn’t all of the media. Quite a lot of it though, sadly.
ah, makes sense now. I must had misunderstood the context. I do hear people all the time complaining about who owns the media and etc. So I was responding how I did by instinct. Yes we do need other voices in the news besides just them.
Haha, that’s fair, a lot of media critique is… not very thoughtful.
unfortunately too many people use that label for anyone that doesn’t agree with their opinions. it’s unfortunate because fascism is a real concern so we should not dillute the term.
Part of the problem is a lot of people are indirectly supporting it by being single issue voters and “putting up with” the stuff they don’t like in order to support the one cause they care about.
the one cause they care about
You mean, themselves?
Yep. But they don’t see it that way, which is what makes it dangerous
Liberals would rather blame anything than take responsibility for their part in legitimizing and platforming fascist rhetoric.
Social media exposed the divisions, it didn’t cause them.
It does more than that, it magnifies, feeds and perpetuates them. It’s not just simple exposition.
Well I remember when being antivax was a meme around 2008.
And social media existed then! In fact, the antivax stuff pretty much lines up directly with the creation of social media.
Well yeah, that’s my point, social media was new at that time when antivax was a meme, now it’s mainstream. Social media just allowed stupid people to spread stupidity at an alarming rate, then we as a society learned how to manipulate effectively through social media. It’s not like social media is some force of nature that accidently fucked up society. Social media is a tool that the richest and worst people in society used to fuck up society.
Granting fascists access to other fascists to become super fascist groups is the most dangerous part of social media.
Given that most of the main social media platforms now are owned by capitalist fascist dickheads, its only going to get worse.
If social networking like Lemmy or Mastodon were more mainstream, we could just name, shame and isolate these monsters. If they can’t interact with people outside of their group without getting instanbanned or insta-defederated, then they’ll either delve deeper and deeper into their nonsense, until their instances gets raided or they’ll venture out of their alt-right safe-haven and get hit with reality and rejoin society.
Dang, came in here to say pretty much the same thing. This has always been there, social media just created an echo chamber.
Good perspective.
Citizen’s United
Is there an option to blame the people themselves?
To an extent, yes. I believe tho that social media enables the potential spread of dividing people. Do I personally think social media is the number one reason, no.
I don’t know (…or care, really) about USA so I’ll speak on more general grounds.
There’s a lot of stuff in social media that makes it a great soapbox for social manipulation:
- low cost, wide reaching: it’s easy to be heard
- decontextualisation: it gives more room for assumers¹ to do their shit, and make an incorrect context out of nowhere.
- virality: it’s easy to start a witch hunt. Cue to the pitchfork emporium / Twitter MC of the day.
- upvote/like-based systems: people don’t upvote your content (increasing its visibility) because you’re right, they do it because you say it confidently.
- on the Internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog: concern trolling made easy.
Now look at what @startle@toast.ooo said: “Dunno man, seems like it might be the fascists.”. IMO that user is being spot on, those five things make social media specially easy to manipulate for fascists². And they’re mostly the ones creating this dichotomisation of society³, because that’s how they’re able to congregate the nutjobs into a political discourse. Suddenly the village idiot doesn’t simply say “they’re hiding aliens from us” (stupid, but morally OK), the discourse becomes “the Jews are hiding aliens from us” (stupid and Antisemitic).
- By “assumers” I mean individuals who are quick to draw conclusions based on little to no reasoning, evidence, or thought. This plague exists since the dawn of time, it’s just that decontextualisation gives them more room to assume shit out of nowhere.
- Fascists often babble about “virtue signalling”, without realising that themselves are prone to signal adherence to their stupid beliefs. They don’t want to be in the receiving end of their own witch hunts.
- By “society” I mean at the very least Western Europe plus the Americas; probably more. It is not exclusive to USA.
To expand more on virality: Platform algorithms reward posts that get engagement because it sells ad space. Posts that trigger our lizard brain get engagement.
Weird. I was gonna blame shitty podcasters/influencers who talk out of their ass.
Social media is not to blame. The people using it are.
The people using it also make up social media. without the people social media is worthless, and powerless. and the more powerless in particular that it is the less divisions it would be able to cause, if that real is the legit cause of dividing people. It might or might not be the main cause but sure we could agree that it enables the spread of divising tactics.
Why does it sound so much like the gun debate?
This is the guns don’t kill people argument.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A plurality of young voters say they hold social media responsible for divisions among Americans, according to a survey released Monday.
A Quinnipiac University poll asked U.S. registered voters to select one of four options to blame for the divisions in the country.
“When it comes to the source of the angry white noise of discord and division, the segment of the population most connected to it is the age group most critical of it,” Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy said in a press release of the poll.
Public officials have struggled to regulate social media, despite known consequences of its use.
A bipartisan coalition of 33 attorneys general recently filed lawsuits against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, accusing the company of knowingly designing features that harm young users’ mental health.
The poll surveyed 1,574 self-identified registered voters nationwide from Nov. 9-13, and it has a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.
The original article contains 216 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 28%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
