How social media’s shift away from progressive bias reflects mainstream values
December 19, 2024
There’s been a lot of complaining that Elon Musk has allowed X (formerly Twitter) to become the plaything of right-wing, even extreme, nonsense. The nonsense is not true, that less left-wing – for which, read: woke and progressive – voices get more of a hearing is true.
But what’s the cause of this? This tweet from Matt Yglesias is interesting:
“One of the big things nobody talks about is that there was a roughly five year span starting around 2013 when Facebook’s algorithm would routinely make left-wing content go viral. It was notable in every newsroom and it shaped coverage and hiring.”
We were there – not at Facebook, but in the environment – at the time, and it was notable. Yglesias was one of the founders of Vox – the website, not the media company – along with Ezra Klein. He is not just complaining or making some trivial point; it was a notable feature of the media at the time.
Social media was, through that – and other similar – algorithms notably more left than either the population or the mainstream media itself. Given the dependence of that mainstream upon clicks at the time it meant that the algorithms moved that mainstream left in its hiring and story selection. Even the views and lenses through which it viewed stories.
The media as a whole significantly diverged from the median views of Americans. A useful explanation of why there has been such an upsurge against those woke and progressive views more recently. When half the population and more thinks it’s being ignored then there will be a reaction.
The true point here is that there should be such a reaction. What’s happened at X is not that suddenly, some extreme right is being favored. It’s that the average and even majority views are no longer being ignored or, worse, censored.
This is why there’s been so much progressive rage at social media in the past couple of years – not just X. They had it, just there in the palm of their hand, the woke. They controlled the mass media and were able to censor those who spoke out against them. Now they can’t – wouldn’t that enrage you too? To have power, then lose it?
It’s entirely true that there are some right-wing voices that fall well over the edge, just as there have always been on both right and left. But the average middle ground of social media these days is a lot better aligned with the average middle ground of national opinions than it used to be. Which, again, is what so enrages so many progressives. What, you mean folk can just say what they mean? They believe? But how will the propaganda work if that can happen?