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You ask me, the more relevant psych study is the Asch Conformity Experiments.
Those have also held up better to replication.
Check out how the results change when you add in a fellow dissenter.
Hence, Elon being a very visible source of open dissent could trigger a lot of others to cease conforming.
More visible than the fricking President of the United States? Not only did Trump have a bigger bully pulpit than Musk, his being elected was a very public single that tens of millions of normies liked what he was saying. DorseyTwitter didn't ban Trump until after Jan 6th.
Even if you ignore Trump, right-wing views that the NYT considered cancellable (e.g. "Blacks do most of the crime", "Transwomen are men" or "Hunter Biden is selling out America") were mainstream on Fox, in the WSJ and NY Post, on talk radio and on Boomer Facebook. The idea that the right was operating by samizdat until Elon bought Twitter is silly. (HBD was beyond the pale in those right-wing venues, but unobfuscated HBD still doesn't fly on ElonTwitter).
Twitter wasn't important because the masses were on Twitter. Twitter was important because aspirant elites who needed to publicly push the party line used Twitter to work out what the party line was in real time. These people . That the sort of person who had a bluecheck on DorseyTwitter hasn't changed their political views is convincing evidence that Elon buying Twitter isn't what is changing the discourse.
The simplest explanation (not necessarily the most correct one) for woke losing ground is that the elites are much more equivocal in supporting it after 10/7 when it became clear that wokestupid can turn anti-Semitic at the drop of a paraglider.
...Yes.
The president's "visibility" was limited in every possible way by the leftist media apparatus. I mean, cmon - he was banned from twitter.
When CNN couldn't avoid covering him at all, they showed spliced single-digit-second clips sandwiched in between minutes of talking-head diatribes.
Fox's power as a sympathetic outlet is minimal. It's been unpalatable to anyone in the moderate space forever. Even if you agree with some of the points, it's not any better. The diatribes are far rougher around the edges - they feel simultaneously more hateful and pandering. And when you're done with those you have to sit through ads for adult diapers.
The bully pulpit became far less bully in those Unprecedented Times.
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Paying attention to "Faux News" or the New York Post puts you outside the bounds of respectability the way browsing Twitter/X does not. And of course Twitter/X is a two-way medium, at least in theory.
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Trump has been a double-edged sword in terms of being a symbol of resistance to the blue tribe's dominance.
I guess if you want to break it down some, Trump is the totem around which Red tribe can coordinate, Musk is a similar totem for the Grey tribe that lean red or are just anti-blue.
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