The truth behind push for social media censorship: Users’ politics don’t match those of media
November 21, 2024
One reason the young gain their news online could be that it’s far less biased than the mainstream and traditional media. It could also be that it’s just a more fun medium, but the bias is definitely something for us to consider.
Pew Research has looked into who the news influencers are online. Also, how they identify politically:
Slightly more news influencers explicitly identify as Republican, conservative or pro-Donald Trump (27% of news influencers) than Democratic, liberal or pro-Kamala Harris (21%).
Those aren’t the portions of Republicans and Democrats in the general population but as the recent election results showed “slightly more” identified with Trump and R than Harris and D.
Compare this to another survey of mainstream journalists from 2022:
Compared with 2013, the percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who claim to be Democrats has increased 8 percentage points in 2022 to about 36 percent, a figure higher than the overall population percentage of 27 percent, …(.)…Journalists who said they were Republicans continued to drop from 18 percent in 2002 and 7.1 percent in 2013 to 3.4 percent in 2022. This figure is notably lower than the percentage of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican party; 26 percent …
Those online influencers, roughly enough, reflect the general population. As compared to that mainstream, where Democrats are significantly over-represented and Republicans truly, wildly, under so.
This could tell us something about why that traditional media is so insistent that online must be controlled, patrolled for misinformation and generally not allowed to be free. Because if it is allowed to run riot under that First Amendment then that’s going to show the gross bias of the major newspapers and traditional outlets.
Yes, we know Jezebel is new media as well, but a nice example all the same.
These audiences are radicalized to believe a liberal, feminist world order is crushing them. Now, thanks to social media algorithms, content about weightlifting, video games, MMA fighting, and dating has become a pipeline to the right.
People seem to disagree with Jezebel sometimes therefore it must be something to be controlled, that information that so misinforms these impressionable young boys.
Take that idea and write it large and that’s what that mainstream complaint about free speech online is. The progressives have a pretty useful headlock on opinion in the traditional media. Therefore the new types of media must be similarly controlled. Otherwise people might hear the wrong ideas, you know, badthink?