I’m wondering if Facebook is at least partially to blame for Americans’ anger toward people who don’t vote the same way as they do. For my face-to-face friends (a.k.a. “real friends”) and neighbors I don’t know a whole lot about their political views. If politics does come up in conversation they tend to moderate their speech so as to avoid offense. If a Trump supporter were at a cocktail party at our town, most people would try not to say that Trump supporters were “stupid, sexist, and racist”. (That said, the one Trump supporter I know had his “Trump/Pence” lawn sign stolen within a couple of days. And the minister at the local Unitarian church filled a sermon with “What to do if you’re stuck at a family dinner with that crazy uncle who belongs to the NRA”. My friend, a retired military officer, thought “I’m that uncle and I don’t think that I’m crazy.” (The minister, who is married to another man and has two adopted children, neither of whom is of the same race as either the minister or his husband, works “diversity” into every sermon, but apparently an NRA member at the table is not as welcome as a Syrian migrant.))
With Facebook, however, we not only can see what everyone thinks about politics but see those views expressed in the strongest possible language.
Example from a anti-welfare-state friend: “[my former graduate school thesis advisor]’s Facebook feed is non-stop liberal hate.” I’m also friends with the guy and indeed his postings do seem hostile to American Deplorables:
Did Don the Con forget to mention his foundation was just SHUT DOWN by the A.G. in New York?
Shame on the WSJ for this editorial complaining that AG Schneiderman’s letter ordering the Trump Foundation to suspend operations and comply with the law is politically motivated and timed.
Bruce is right [when Springsteen talks about Trump having “no sense of decency”]
An ignorant thug gets his comeuppance. [over an article about Trump “groping women”]
Scientific American grades the candidates on science. Trump gets an F:
Washington Post follows with another huge slam: “It’s beyond debate that Donald Trump is unfit to be president.”
NYT offers a wordy, highbrow takedown of Donald Trump. In few words: He’s a bigot and a liar.
Why mince words, @latimes ? Trump is the biggest liar to run for president.
“Trump isn’t even qualified to be human, much less President.” Choice words here.
Trump’s campaign: built on racism and lies because he’s a racist and a liar.
Watching Michelle Obama speak now. She’s so good, so compelling. The presidential qualifications she speaks of rise far about party lines. [i.e., the spouse of a current or recent leader is a source of political guidance]
If not for Facebook both of us would likely be unaware of this guy’s (1) hatred for Trump and Trump supporters, and (2) hero(ine)-worship of Michelle Obama.
For my part, I was defriended after commenting on a posting demanding that Clarence Thomas resign because of a story quoting a woman who says the he touched her in 1999. (I asked “If I can find a woman to say that you touched her 17 years ago, will you give up your job and paycheck?”) I lost another “friend” after he celebrated the firing of Billy Bush based on a recording made surreptitiously 11 years ago. (I asked “Would you want your employer to make secret recordings of you and then decide whether or not to continue to employ you based on comments that you had expected to remain private? What if a Republican employer used these recordings to fire all of the most vocal Hillary supporters?”)
What do folks think? People are saying that Americans are more polarized than ever. Could it be that the rise of polarization with each election cycle is tracking the increasing popularity of Facebook? Another factor, of course, is that government consumes a larger percentage of the economy every year (now up to about 50 percent of GDP; compare to less than 20 percent in Singapore where, presumably, they aren’t bickering all the time). So of course people fight more about how the central planners in Washington, D.C. and state/local ministries will spend this increasing percentage, just as a family discussion over what new car or house to buy is more intense than a discussion about whether to buy a book or movie. But with Facebook we’re a lot more aware of what other citizens are advocating.
I think you do have a point. I think a lack of tangible negative feedback is a big factor in this. Used to be that if you ran your mouth too much you’d lose some teeth or at least get told to pull your head out of your ass. For all the “cyber bullying” that’s supposed to going on, most peoples facebooks are mostly an echo chamber, no matter how vile they might be.
People seem to find it very comforting to be right all the time.
Robert Charles Wilson has a good book on the subject called “The Affinities”.
60 minutes had a segment on the election last night, and much of it was devoted to how nasty people are getting with one another. Apparently it’s very difficult to run a focus group these days with any diversity of opinion. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-american-voters-on-trump-clinton/
Usenet was making them hate each other before slashdot before myspace before facebook. People do things online that they wouldn’t do in real life.
yes, i absolutely believe that facebook and social media have contributed to the shutdown of people’s logic, reason, and empathy. we’re becoming socially isolated and living in our heads more than ever.
this is compounded by the unfathomable amount of instant information that lets us find the story we want instead of the story that “is” (and lets us argue about what “is” is in the first place.)
try to read through the comment section of any major news site to see just how awful everyone can be.
we’re becoming a drooling pile of anxiety-ridden white-knucklers mashing the share button on any pseudo-news and infotainment that scrolls by and regurgitating as many buzzword bombs as fast as possible just so we can “come out on top” and win some useless and non-existent argument we think we’re having.
there are a lot of reasons it doesn’t happen as much when people are face-to-face. in the best case, people still generally have some humanity left. otherwise, there’s accountability. you can get punched, or your grandstanding and scathing diatribes that you bash out and think sound amazing at 3am wind up sounding pretty stupid when you actually say them out loud to people who’re actually standing in front of you.
the bad thing is that it looks like people are becoming less afraid of transitioning their horrible social media personas into real life.
I too have discovered that people have a lot thinner skins online. Not sure if it is because it is in writing or because of the wider audience or both but it’s impossible to have the same jokes or arguments on fb vs in person. Anonymous boards are a completely different animal.
Politically incorrect Bender got it right: “I’ll start my own Facebook, with blackjack and hookers”
jack crossfire: “Usenet was making them hate each other before slashdot before myspace before facebook. People do things online that they wouldn’t do in real life.”
The number of facebook users is likely vastly larger than the number of usenet users. Thus, the “hate” is normal with Facebook in a way it never was with usenet. Also, with usenet, the “hate” was compartmentalized and you had to go look into the compartments to see it. With facebook, you get the “hate” in the stream of other stuff you might be interested in seeing from your “friends”.
Now that election draws nigh, let me urge you all:
dude weed lmao! Vote for your Johnson!
>“Would you want your employer to make secret recordings of you and
>then decide whether or not to continue to employ you based on comments
>that you had expected to remain private?
Secret recordings? They were in their workplace wearing microphones for an interview while surrounded by a television crew. How could there be a reasonable expectation of privacy?
>What if a Republican employer
>used these recordings to fire all of the most vocal Hillary supporters?”
Billy was fired because that tape directly compromised his ability to do his job which was to attract viewers to a TV show. This is different from your hypothetical where an employer arbitrarily fires employees because of political statements (which in most situations would actually be legal anyway).
So you were unfriended because you posed a straw-man which the receiver was either unable or unwilling to deflate while simultaneously appearing to defend something the receiver found abhorrent (Trump’s statements).
By the way, you missed a much stronger defense of Billy which is:
“So you are given a work assignment to bond and work with a very powerful celebrity who starts saying some offensive things right before the interview. Would you really have behaved so differently from Billy? Is it possible there is some nervousness in his laughter and encouragement? In that moment, would you really confront a person who probably had the ability to break your entire career over what were (in that moment) only words?”
I wrote this a week ago and scheduled it for today. Yet just as this posting went live, a Facebook friend who lives in New York posted that “[Trump’ is tearing us apart. A vote for him is a direct assault on my family.” (Note that Trump, Trump’s family, Trump’s campaign staff, and anyone voting for Trump are likely unaware of this person’s existence.)
Scale up Singapore to the size of the US of A, saddle it with the same foreign policies and then come and tell me how much its government spends of the GDP.
> A vote for him is a direct assault on my family.
There are living American citizens who experienced being forced to Mexico the last time mass deportations like those proposed by Donald occurred. It is really a measure of this election season that there are people for whom saying something this crazy isn’t really all that crazy.
Federico: If we want to be rich like the folks in Singapore and have a lean government like theirs, then all we need to do is break up the U.S. into a bunch of smaller countries, each the size of Singapore? (if we need to get down to their geographic size as well as population size, then give away the excess land to Canada, Mexico, or Facebookers who want to found Hillaryland?)