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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Having worked at a media firm, I find this very plausible.

At one point I decided to take a look at my journalist coworkers' Twitter profiles. ~95% of the people they were following were not only other journalists, but other journalists of similar, if not identical, political bent. This makes sense, of course, because people will always prefer to hear viewpoints that reinforce their own, but for journalists this is a problem because they're supposed to be providing information, yet they are especially subject to feedback loops created when they fail in attempting to understand viewpoints that aren't intuitive to them. Worse yet, extremism is almost always rewarded on platforms like Twitter, and because journalists are partly driven by a need for fame and brand recognition, they're encouraged to be openly biased.

EDIT: I don't want to paint all journalists in a bad light. What I described just seemed common in my experience.

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I saw a different study that said on Twitter right-leaning accounts also follow the left-leaning accounts, while left-leaning accounts do not follow the right-leaning accounts.

This matches my experience in the bay area and progressive social media circles where one group has a trend of immediately blocking someone that isn't using the verbatim party line talking points. A "with us or against us" mentality, whether you are actually on the other side of the aisle or not.

Do you mind linking the study? My google scholar searches didn't turn up anything

I'm not the person you're addressing but I seem to remember this pew research article that sort of fits the bill of what he's describing.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2012/03/12/social-netwo...

Thanks! Unless I’m missing something this study doesn’t differentiate between left and right political content.

However, it’s interesting how 75% said they have friends who post political content, but only 35% said they post it themselves

> it’s interesting how 75% said they have friends who post political content, but only 35% said they post it themselves

Care to elaborate? I don't see why those numbers would be more than very loosely connected through the social graph?

Also it seems completely reasonable if everyone is telling the truth. Most people have more than one friend and it only takes one of them posting political content to answer yes to the first question.

It does mention that left-leaning users are twice as likely to block, unfriend or hide those posting political content they do not like:

> Liberals are the most likely to have taken each of these steps to block, unfriend, or hide. In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates.

Is it that one party is more likely to be offended or that one party is likely to be more offensive?

Self-proclaimed moderates block, unfriend and hide the least, so that would suggested left-leaning users are more likely to be offended.

What's the difference? Offense is in the mind of the offendee not the offender. Liberals in NY and SF have taken being offended to an art form I hadn't seen since old church ladies got angry when you didn't say H-E-double hokey stick.

I don't practice moral relativism, and that is likely outside the scope of this discussion.

My point is, it's not just a difference of opinion when a group of people promote racist, neo-Nazi views (alt-right), or peddle in conspiracy theories (Qanon).

Are we just going to ignore the significant presence of these groups on Twitter?

There's a reason why people are blocking and it's not merely disagreement. One side treats the other differently but not for the reasons being presented.

>My point is, it's not just a difference of opinion when a group of people promote racist, neo-Nazi views (alt-right), or peddle in conspiracy theories (Qanon).

    Opinion: A thought or belief about something or someone [0]

If racism and conspiracy theories aren't thoughts or beliefs about something or someone what do you think they are?

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/opinion

They said "it's not just a difference of opinion", not "it's not an opinion".

If one side is transmit-only and never actually reads anything except keywords from the accounts they follow, and the other side is attempting to limit the amount of useless spew in their lives, that would explain the asymmetry.

Each individual asked has multiple friends, presumably, so this isn't a case of "80% of drivers think they're above average." At least not necessarily.

Hm thats from 2012.

I think there is a more recent one, 2017-2019, that even more closely matches the my experience for the last 5 years

Also not the study, but the results would be in line with another study I know about from the book "The Righteous Mind":

"... we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a 'typical liberal' would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a 'typical conservative' would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people's expectations about 'typical' partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right. Who was best able to pretend to be the other?"

"The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predications, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as 'very liberal.' The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as 'One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal' or 'Justice is the most important requirement for a society,' liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree."

Link to the study itself: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Do they differentiate between "following" and "monitoring"? For example, I definitely am leftward, and while I don't follow @realDonaldTrump, I read his posts every day.

My reasoning is that Trump tends to conflate followers with fan base, and I don't want to contribute to his ego, false sense of popular vote, or any of the other optics that he presents when talking about numbers that look good on him.

I suspect I'm not the only person on the left hand side who thinks this way.

If the study is true, why do you suppose that right-leaning folks don’t think the same way?

It indicates there is more of value to following those people and less value to following others.

I'm sure other studies will affirm that certain conspiracy theories like QAnon are blocked more than they are followed.

Sometimes it's not just a matter of different opinions.

If someone is posting about Perl a bunch, I don't write a lot of Perl and my timeline is full of Perl content I would unfollow rather than block.

Yes, almost as if there is something about QAnon that is blockworthy.

> but for journalists this is a problem because they're supposed to be providing information,

I do not expect journalists to use their twitter timeline as the foundation of all their reporting.

You would hope not, but given the number of stories these days that are just, “hey look at this Tweet!”, I don’t think we can expect that much.

https://youtu.be/mpHiDsnqOSA

Seems plausible that the information journalists relay is a function of their network, and I don’t have a hard time believing that they are similarly selective about their non-Twitter networks. The degree of bias is certainly an interesting question, but it seems unlikely that it is “low”, especially given what we’ve observed from various antics at the NYT to the same farcical coverage of the Covington Catholic affair across our national media to the farcical coverage of the Damore memo by tech and other media to the Washington Post’s heartfelt eulogy of an ISIS leader and on and on. All signs point to high insularity and intolerance of other ideologies (by which I don’t mean extreme right wing ideologies but rather more moderate progressive or liberal ideologies, for example the attempts by other journalists to “cancel” progressive journalist Lee Fang who erred by interviewing a black man whose opinion wasn’t sufficiently aligned with the orthodoxy). There are many such events that come to my mind, and my perception is that they are increasing in both quantity and gravity; I’m certainly persuaded that more research is merited with respect to the dynamics of both traditional and social media. Maybe that research will correct me and in fact journalists are doing a great job; in that “worst case” scenario, I (and others skeptical of the state of the media) walk away with more trust in the media and our national divide closes a bit.

EDIT: wow, that’s a lot of downvotes for what I thought was a metered, well-supported post. I wonder what objections people have to my appeal for more research on the subject? Do downvoters disagree with my perception about bias in the media? And if so how do we resolve this difference of perception if not with more research? What is so fearful about additional inquiry?

Repeating stuff from Twitter does seem to be how an awful lot of journalists are doing their jobs these days, particularly for local news. Many local news stories I see in my area are just little more than a three-paragraph wrapper around a series of Twitter screenshots.

I expect the reduction of local media to a retweeting engine is probably a function of cratering local news budgets. It's far cheaper to outsource news-gathering to the wisdom of crowds than to pay journalists to do the work directly.

Above the local market, if you follow the right circles on Twitter you stand a very good chance of getting advance notice of what the media will be reporting several hours (or even several days) before the stories are broadcast/published.

Twitter's algo seems to play a significant role by diminishing the reach of less active participants. I've started opening the list of people I'm following to find those I haven't seen in a while, or at all. Nine times out of ten there is recent content available that I'd consider superior to the political whinging that tends to dominate my default feed.

I'm still interested in socially relevant topics, but I value variety as well.

> This makes sense, of course, because people will always prefer to hear viewpoints that reinforce their own

They might just be keeping up with competition.

Long before Twitter I'm sure like-minded journalists also spent more time together and had better professional and personal relationships (at least on an intellectual level) than they did with others.

To follow your point: what does it say about journalists that don't use Twitter at all?

I'm not a journalist, just a rando

I don't follow right-wing types on Twitter or anywhere but I make a point to check foxnews and read the comments and click around on increasingly aggressive right-wing Twitter profiles and read their comments, along with traversing right-wing websites like Breitbart and ZeroHedge pretty regularly.

If you looked at my profile it would also look like I only follow and listen to a small bubble. That's because I don't want their BS cluttering up my life and intruding when I don't want it. I choose when to let their ideologies into my life in a controlled manor, it works much better this way.

This is even worse than not following people on the right. You are just seeking out the worst and most toxic media that will reinforce your view of the right. There are plenty of reasonable people that identify with the right (not necessarily Trump) such as Julius Krein and Ross Douthat and David Frum. Try to seek out the best of the other side instead.

None of that is particularly surprising or alarming if you consider Twitter to be a networking tool, though. It seems like that's exactly what it is for many, including people in tech. You talk to people in your industry, exchange advice, possibly even look for a job.

The assumption in the study is that journalists are also using Twitter as a source for their journalism but that isn't really substantiated anywhere. Yes, there's plenty of clickbait crap that recycles whatever the latest X is on social media, but in terms of actual original reporting? I'm not so convinced.

Purely anecdotal, but the couple of local journalists I follow on Twitter will directly ask for leads on things they are working, over Twitter.

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