
Blue Feed, Red Feed - andr
http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/#/president-trump
======
bmelton
Man... just wow. My immediate impression of this was how great the divide is
on media between the left and the right. I don't know how much of this is
attributable to standard ad targeting, some facebook interest algorithm or
what, but man, the divide is huge.

My second impression here though is perhaps the more impactful -- most of what
I'm seeing is just ugly, ugly headlines, and in both the red and blue columns.
I don't know what I did right in my life that these headlines aren't currently
the kind that I'm seeing in my news and Facebook feeds, but thank heavens I
did it.

It's really no wonder that people are mad about things -- these headlines are
basically begging them to be.

~~~
tshibley
When clicks drive profit headlines and stories take a noticeable dive in my
opinion.

~~~
mmalone
And Facebook emphasizes the headline keeping the person who shared it and the
actual source relatively obscured. 99% of people only see the picture and the
headline.

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tshibley
This is an awesome project, and the type of thing I hope we continue to see
more of from high profile media outlets throughout the United States. Using
data visualization to break down the issues that divide is an a very concrete
way, and help expose our very fractured country to the range of voices yelling
in their own echo chambers. Excellent work WSJ.

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IBM
Andrew Sullivan wrote a good piece a few months ago related to this [1]:

>What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was
media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political
democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around
two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our
democratic discourse. The process had its origins in partisan talk radio at
the end of the past century. The rise of the internet — an event so swift and
pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood —
further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each
outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to
entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.

>So much of this was welcome. I relished it myself in the early aughts,
starting a blog and soon reaching as many readers, if not more, as some small
magazines do. Fusty old-media institutions, grown fat and lazy, deserved a
drubbing. The early independent blogosphere corrected facts, exposed bias,
earned scoops. And as the medium matured, and as Facebook and Twitter took
hold, everyone became a kind of blogger. In ways no 20th-century journalist
would have believed, we all now have our own virtual newspapers on our
Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter timelines — picking stories from countless
sources and creating a peer-to-peer media almost completely free of editing or
interference by elites. This was bound to make politics more fluid. Political
organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to
be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement
with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.

There's an interesting discussion to be had about this. It feels
counterintuitive to say that more democracy and more equality is bad, but at
least in media I think it's proving to be true. I think liberal democracy is
going to be challenged going forward all over the world because of this and it
may be difficult for many societies to stay that way.

[1] [http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-
tyranny...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-
donald-trump.html)

~~~
erkkie
The problem now is information overload. Effectively we've gone from less
information, to good information, to too much information causing overload
leading to less information. This makes it easy for bubbles to form by various
biases.

~~~
throwawayReply
Similar arguments were made for why the clergy should conduct prayers in latin
and why literacy isn't important.

You can't just take information away or try to "curate" the information seen,
that's what censorship is.

We just need to learn to live in a world where everyone knows too much about
others and where it can be difficult to tell the difference between truth and
lie.

~~~
erkkie
Agreed, the skill to differentiate good and bad sources and get your world
view from a combined set of sources, each having their own (known and
accounted for biases) is key.

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RandomInteger4
Recently towards the end of the election I went through my feed blocking
various news sites from even appearing; left or right, but especially many of
the sites found in the link above.

That being said, seeing the sites from the link above, it seems like there are
more tabloid/fake sites being shared by the conservative side of the isle. I
wonder if this has anything to do with those Macedonians and similar people
that took advantage of the fearmongering of Trump to make a profit or if those
sites have always been around.

~~~
Symbiote
Macedonia?

How is Macedonia related to this?

~~~
stanleydrew
There was a story in BuzzFeed a couple days ago about how there are like 140
fake conservative news sites all basically run by teenagers out of a single
Macedonian town. For Adsense revenue.

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-
became...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-
global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo?utm_term=.cigAoEJO2#.sray1om7R)

------
dpwm
A time-travelling variant of these feeds would be fascinating. If the UK is
anything to go by, the election result will see the quality of the news in
these feeds jet-propelled into an abyss. I don't know if terms of service or
copyright prevent archival of the feeds.

A portion of the media will conflate the idea that many racists would have
voted for Donald Trump with the simplistic idea that most who voted trump are
racist. Looking at the blue feed, that happened some time ago.

Next, opportunists on the other side will seize this and present the now non-
controversial idea that white supremacy won, everybody else are sore losers
and should get over it. Of course, the truth is much more complicated than
that and you end up with a minority that would do harm believing that they are
a vindicated majority, and many of the harmless majority will believe this
too. Looking at the red feed, we're already at the sore losers, get over it
stage.

Just as the polls got Brexit wrong, most got this election wrong. Yet in the
UK, the media continue to report any opinion poll result that agrees with
their own editorial perspective. What we end up with in the UK is not the will
of the people, but a perverted variant of it.

I think the deeper problem boils down to the fact that many people do not want
to be under-represented, but have no problem with being over-represented --
both in policy decisions and media coverage -- without acknowledging that they
felt under-represented because they felt others were over-represented.

~~~
mavelikara
> I think the deeper problem boils down to the fact that many people do not
> want to be under-represented, but have no problem with being over-
> represented -- both in policy decisions and media coverage -- without
> acknowledging that they felt under-represented because they felt others were
> over-represented.

+1

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notliketherest
Facebook is a distraction and a waste of time, like watching too much TV. Stop
blaming Facebook and take a look in the mirror. Turn off your computers, put
down your phones, and read a god damn history book for a change people.

~~~
scrollaway
I'm going to blow your mind here: You can read a history book _and_ your
facebook feed. They're not mutually exclusive (crazy, I know).

And please stop blaming people for doing essentially what they want. If a
very, very large amount of people are doing what they shouldn't be doing, the
overall system is broken. This is why we have laws, instead of simply politely
asking people to stop killing each other. It's why we have regulations,
instead of nicely asking companies not to dump toxic waste into their
backyards.

Right now, a huge amount of media is optimized for ads instead of information
and it's actively harmful to our lives. This isn't a problem that'll get
resolved by nicely asking the media to stop doing what it's been doubling down
on for the past decade.

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Kiro
I'm in the (unusual?) spot of almost exclusively seeing things in my feed from
the "other" camp. That's because all my friends are on the opposite spectrum
of the political compass. I actually think that's worse than only seeing
things you agree with. It makes me more polarized in my views.

~~~
adrianN
This is called the "backfire effect"

[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Backfire_effect](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Backfire_effect)

~~~
Kiro
That's very interesting! Thank you.

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stanleydrew
There seem to be a lot of headlines on the "conservative" side that take
pleasure in the dismay of "liberals". I have seen this crop up on Reddit and
4chan in comments too.

Some examples:

"Here's some more incredible news that's sure to drive liberals even crazier."

"Liberal heads will explode in 3....2....1...."

"The amount of butt-hurt following Donald Trump's win has been insane"

Not sure I have any conclusions yet, just an observation.

~~~
eggie
The liberals are a kind of politically oppressed demographic and cultural
majority. Conservatives enjoy the sensation of lording their control of the
political sphere over liberals. It's validation of their position that nothing
else is currently providing them.

~~~
choko
I think it might have something to do with the right being absolutely (and not
always fairly) demonized by the media over the course of this election cycle.
You can expect schadenfreude for a little while. The left certainly engaged in
the same in 2008 and 2012.

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majewsky
Can someone share some screenshots? I have *.facebook.com blocked on multiple
levels, so the feeds are empty for me.

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mattnumbe
Does anyone know a way to filter the feed to words other than the terms given?

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vxNsr
This is a great project and really gives you a great understanding of how bad
each side has gotten.

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brockvond
anyone didn't know this is how ALL these sites work... just doesn't care about
facts, or the news... or the world even. if you care... you check facts... if
you don't... then you don't check.

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zamalek
The left got their safe space. Did they expect that the same algorithm
wouldn't result in a hate space for the right?

~~~
throwawayReply
Safe space for the right.

A being a space where someone is free to express themselves. For the right,
whether you agree with them or not, that space was no longer the mainstream.

By labeling yours a "safe space" and theirs as "hate space" you are part of
the problem.

~~~
zamalek
> The left got _their_ safe space.

Note emphasis. More explicitly stated: the "safe space" that was
invented/demanded by the left is why the algorithm created a "hate space" for
the right. The red never asked for hate, it is what the left fed them.

Not correctly listening to your opponents' arguments is the actual problem
here. Regurgitating arguments is the problem here. Presumption about another
person's stance is the problem here. This is exactly how the working class in
America got angry and voted. They were screaming to be heard and all they got
is "you are part of the problem. Shut up, you are in my safe space."

As it turns out, the notion of having a "safe space" is as bad a "hate space,"
because in the end both are hate spaces.

~~~
grandwigg
Exactly. That's kind of the point of free speech to begin with, at least in
part. If a person can only express oneself in a specific zone, you end up with
bottled emotions, ideas and frustrations boiling over by the time the arrive.

Combine that with the generalization that occurs on the more polarizing
subjects (life/choice, guns, violence, police, race. . .) It snowballs.

Especially in a culture where there is a fear of expressing an opinion such as
'my body, my life' or 'all lives matter’ or ‘guns don't kill, people do' will
often result in hate from acquaintances and strangers .

As a society, I think we're are still learning how to deal with the idea that
anyone can say something with the potential to be seen by the masses, and be
responded to in kind -and en masse.

