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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   28079 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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You seriously think social media is making teens more liberal?

Look up Redit from 10 years ago and tell me if it got more or less liberal.

There's certainly liberal content on most (if not all) social media websites. But the impact of their algorithms is almost universally to push users in the direction of right-wing content. Reddit's algorithms are theoretically transparent (i.e. officially what is highlighted is controlled by the votes of real people but there's regular claims of fake accounts being used to mess with the vote counts), so it may be one of the ones least affected by this.

But also, the nature of social media being a customized feed for every user means that it's very difficult to judge how liberal the median (or whatever) view of a site is. From my perspective, Tumblr is very woke, but I somewhat often see discussions of the conservative views being espoused elsewhere on the site.

10-ish years ago Reddit collectively bullied Ellen Pao out of being the CEO. Today anything mildly non-progressive gets dowvoted, removed, and the user gets banned. Twitter from a decade ago was also uncomparably more friendly towards right-wing thought than it is even now, after Elon bought it.

It is also very disputable whether the algorithms move people to the right (or to the left for that matter), rather than towards an establishment-friendly worldview within one's political wing

The algorithms give you more of what you like to engage with, so perhaps either everyone likes right wing content (doubtful) or you’re wrong about what the algorithms are doing

The algorithms give you more of what you like to engage with,

Almost every platform manipulates the algorithm to steer it's users towards what the company wants, rather than what the users want organically.

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