Social media - echo chambers and politics

[PsychoSerenity]

And I think Hermit might tie with me for being the leftest in the village.

Hey, what about me? I'd like to see a money-less society where everyone just learns to share!

[Brian Peacock]

Burn the Peacenik Hippy!

[pErvinalia]

And I think Hermit might tie with me for being the leftest in the village.

Hey, what about me? I'd like to see a money-less society where everyone just learns to share!

COMMIE!

(and you're not here enough to count...)

[Tero]

Pulled up Rum thread for this. Sorry if it bothers.

Comments on the book Everybody Lies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Stephens-Davidowitz

[Tero]

What the book actually covers. Using indirect means to do polls, rather than phone, is a major factor relating to the results. Political science people have dome numerous studies. One was the rural Nebraska one.

[Tero]

More on the book:
By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information—unprecedented in history—can tell us a great deal about who we are—the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable.

Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women?

Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health—both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.

[JimC]

I twitch automatically when seeing anything written by someone with the first name Seth...

[Brian Peacock]

Think of your happy place Jim... Everything's going to be okay. We're all here for you.

[JimC]

(and you know, of course, that my happy place is a gin distillery with free samples...)

[Svartalf]

I twitch automatically when seeing anything written by someone with the first name Seth...

At least that one is not going to raise desert storms on you, or lock you inside a sarcophagus before deciding it would be safer to cut you into multiple pieces...

[Svartalf]

(and you know, of course, that my happy place is a gin distillery with free samples...)

You know, you should invest money in gin distilleries... you'd just tell them to give you your dividends in kind.

[Tero]

The book does address politics a bit, but as the author was in Google, he profiles us mostly based on what we google. A used copy is on order.

[Tero]

Twitter's ads are the easiest to spot and skip over. It does no pop ups.

NYT
Twitter
Twitter has spent most of 2022 locked in battle with Elon Musk — who wanted to buy the company for $44 billion, then decided he didn’t, then decided he did again.

Musk told investors this week that he plans to close the deal by Friday and take control of Twitter. I’ve written that a Musk-controlled Twitter will have several major problems from the start, including a staff revolt, mass firings of executives and changes to Twitter’s content moderation rules that could be unpopular. And while Musk certainly planned for some amount of chaos, he may be surprised by how hard it is to run the company.

Even without any Musk-related drama, Twitter will face challenges. The company rarely turns a profit, and growth has been slow for years.

Prognosis: Acute short-term pain, with promises of a vague miracle cure ahead.

Reason for hope: Financially, Twitter is in a better position than many rivals. If the Musk deal goes through, shareholders will get bought out at a good price ($54.20 per share), and the company — which will no longer be publicly traded — will get some relief from the pressures of the markets.

Once we are done with Trump completely, I will reduce Twitter time.

None of the others has much for me. I would rather scroll Youtube than Tik Tok

TikTok
TikTok has what every social media company wants — a big, engaged user base, a format that keeps people scrolling for hours and an iron grip on youth culture and the entertainment industry.

But in some ways, TikTok is the most vulnerable app of all. The Chinese company ByteDance owns it, and U.S. regulators have been circling for years, looking for proof that the Chinese government is steering or influencing TikTok. If they find it, they could declare TikTok a threat to national security and ban the app — game over.

Prognosis: Unlikely to die of natural causes but could easily be killed by a blunt instrument.

Reason for hope: TikTok is incredibly popular. Politicians fearful of public backlash could look for a more moderate solution than an outright ban.

[Tero]

It's quite surprising how Musk thought that his meddling would make Twitter profitable. And that the shift from rather anonymous owners to a something resembling Rupert Murdoch but on a messaging app would go unnoticed. Or somehow salvage the site for the right wing.

[Sean Hayden]

Well he is the richest man in the world, when was the last time our twattishmobishness affected him?