- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Graph showing a 30% drop in UK users on Twitter since September 2023, which, the commenter says is on the back of a loss of about a third in the preceding months.
Graph showing a 30% drop in UK users on Twitter since September 2023, which, the commenter says is on the back of a loss of about a third in the preceding months.
If you want a good example of the damage echo chambers can do, look at the democrat performance in last year’s election. To get people to vote for you you have to listen and respond to their concerns.
You may not agree with their proposed solutions, but you can’t ignore whole segments of society.
But there’s a difference between a political party ignoring their constituents and a social media platform where people don’t want to interact with assholes. Social interaction, in general, is a series of echo chambers. You’re not gonna invite the MAGA asshole everybody hates to your birthday to balance out the conversation because he’ll rant about out how certain groups of people don’t deserve rights when the cake comes out. You’re gonna invite your friends who you largely agree with in your opinions and interests. We used to kick those kinds of people out all the time on the internet, and nobody had any issues with “echo chambers” back when forums were still the thing people used.
Social media isn’t some public debate floor. It’s the local pub.
If that’s what you think the cause of the election results was, then you are in your own echo chamber. A democratic candidate could have come out and said they have a million dollars and a lifetime supply of Diet Mountain Dew for every voter and the MAGA crowd would have said it was Soros money and started shilling red shirts and hats with “Don’t The Dew” on them. The problem wasn’t the democratic outreach; it was that the GOP was taking every opportunity to poison the well. You can see how it splinters their own party, because they just throw hate in all directions, but it doesn’t matter because they’ve built a “brand”. It’s the same way that Christians can give their money to the church while knowing full well that it only goes to support hate groups and pedophiles. It’s a cognitive dissonance of loving hate. The GOP built their own echo chamber out of brick and mortar, and they have sealed the entire party inside. It wasn’t that the Democrats were excluding voters, it was the voters that were excluding the Democrats.