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Comment by GaryNumanVevo | Hacker News Reader

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...

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