There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

young voters say social media to blame for divisions in the u.s

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.

jordanlund ,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

Social media exposed the divisions, it didn’t cause them.

rob299 OP ,

Good perspective.

PresidentCamacho ,

Well I remember when being antivax was a meme around 2008.

stolid_agnostic ,

And social media existed then! In fact, the antivax stuff pretty much lines up directly with the creation of social media.

PresidentCamacho ,

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.

mkhoury ,
@mkhoury@lemmy.ca avatar

It does more than that, it magnifies, feeds and perpetuates them. It’s not just simple exposition.

stolid_agnostic ,

Dang, came in here to say pretty much the same thing. This has always been there, social media just created an echo chamber.

spudwart ,

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.

BeefPiano ,

Citizen’s United

blazera ,
@blazera@kbin.social avatar

Is there an option to blame the people themselves?

rob299 OP ,

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.

lvxferre ,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

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 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).

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. By “society” I mean at the very least Western Europe plus the Americas; probably more. It is not exclusive to USA.
Semi-Hemi-Demigod , (edited )
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

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.

Potatos_are_not_friends ,

Weird. I was gonna blame shitty podcasters/influencers who talk out of their ass.

HairHeel ,
@HairHeel@programming.dev avatar

Social media is not to blame. The people using it are.

rob299 OP ,

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.

PresidentCamacho ,

This is the guns don’t kill people argument.

newthrowaway20 ,

Why does it sound so much like the gun debate?

startle ,

Dunno man, seems like it might be the fascists.

NocturnalMorning ,

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.

reddig33 ,

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.

NocturnalMorning ,

What does any of that have to do with disinformation campaigns being easier with social media?

LarkinDePark ,

So it’s fascist infighting then.

Omega_Haxors ,

That and platforms that passively protect them while actively suppressing anyone calling them out.

SnotFlickerman ,

…who own the media. Like Rupert Murdoch and David Zaslav.

Kalkaline ,
@Kalkaline@leminal.space avatar

Seems like one side wants to feed and educate kids on tax payer dollars while the other one wants to install a dictatorship.

LarkinDePark ,

Hasn’t child poverty skyrocketed under this child friendly side? As well as could labour?

Omega_Haxors ,

If you include their allies, the child head count is through the fucking roof.

5BC2E7 ,

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.

dom ,

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.

tias ,

the one cause they care about

You mean, themselves?

dom ,

Yep. But they don’t see it that way, which is what makes it dangerous

Omega_Haxors ,

Liberals would rather blame anything than take responsibility for their part in legitimizing and spreading fascist rhetoric.

PresidentCamacho ,

Who use social media to spread influence.

autotldr Bot ,

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!

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • [email protected]
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •