I'm not sure why GP was downvoted. There are many, many examples. You would probably see them if your primary news sources weren't the NYT, the Washington Post, CNN, or MSNBC. Twitter is the poster child for authoritarian leftist social media!
There is still, today, multiple years after the start of the pandemic, no strong evidence that masks did anything significant to slow the spread of COVID. I can provide many citations if you need them. In fact, much of what big tech censored turned out to be true or still plausible today, like: the lab leak theory, natural immunity being more effective than the vaccine (even Bill Gates admits this now!), and so on.
Free rhetorical tip: stop using the word "leftist" if you want people to take you seriously. Just because people are opposed to the Republican Party doesn't mean they are leftists. Suggesting they are is to present a false dichotomy.
I appreciate the tip, but what word should I use instead? Progressive? I think just about everything being done on the left today is regressive. Liberal? I think the left in general today is about is illiberal as it gets. Non-conservative? I think it includes too many people, because I do believe there are moderates, independents, and people who could care less either way.
I agree that "leftist" can be divisive, but I haven't found a different word to use that doesn't also convey what I believe to be a falsehood. I also carefully use the word "conservative" instead of "Republican", because I don't think those two are the same thing either. It's also hard to use equivalent language because, while you can say "leftist", you can't really say "rightist".
Fundamentally, a conservative wants to preserve the status quo because they think proposed changes would make it worse. A progressive wants to change the status quo because they think they can improve it. But often when we use these words we are instead referring to a set of political ideals and beliefs supported by a group of people. There are lots of things conservatives would want to change today because they think we've gone in the wrong direction, and there are plenty of wins the left wants to preserve that are under assault by conservatives.
I think your approach is correct, but you landed on the wrong word. I'm not sure what the correct word is, but the asymmetry you mention goes deeper than word choice.
Say what you want about the integrity of mainstream journalism and big tech platforms, but their foibles are nothing compared to the state of Republican-leaning journalism in the United States. It hardly requires a "leftist" political ideology to acknowledge the moral and intellectual decline of the Republican Party and the respective decline of its media apparatus.
None of this excuses selective censorship, obviously, but the suggestion that right-wing journalism deserves equal time and consideration presupposes a credibility and seriousness that it's lacked for twenty years.
Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, you did not help me come up with a better word. I also don't agree with your reasoning for the word asymmetry. "Progressive" is the word that would be symmetric to "conservative". I purposely do not use that word, though, for reasons I've already explained. Also, I fail to see how the word "rightist" not being in use, as opposed to "leftist", is caused by, to paraphrase you, the Republican party being stupider than the Democrat party.
It's filled with people making their guesses and having very little evidence to back it up. My favorite is: "I’ve heard people on the political right called “rightists” before, but for some reason that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as “leftist."
The definition they provide at the end is: "a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change”. That sounds completely synonymous with "progressive," which is generally about using the force of government to cause change in the world. But that really has nothing to do with what liberal has meant in the past, or with the root of the word, or with related words like liberty.
As a side note, if you think the Republican party is intellectually inferior to the democrat party, then I think you have a serious bias problem. I regularly debate people on the left, and they tend to follow similar patterns:
* They make strong claims but never give any evidence to back them up or bother to cite any sources.
* They have major logical inconsistencies in their arguments.
* They very often rely on appeals to authority or credentials. They are right because their sources are always right, and you are wrong because your sources are always wrong.
* They very often rely on personal attacks, or quickly devolve to them.
* They don't seem to understand how scientific research is conducted, including its limitations.
And, finally, if we're going to get back on topic with respect to censorship, I provided multiple examples in other comments of conservatives being unfairly censored, and of leftists violating the rules worse than the conservatives and not getting censored. Nothing in this thread has done anything to change my opinion. Elon Musk, who has historically voted Democrat his entirely life, and who still leans left on many issues, spent 44 billion on twitter in part because he believes it unfairly censors conservatives. What is your evidence to the contrary?
That's a not-peer-reviewed study that the media went wild with that concluded, yes, conservatives are censored more, but it's just because they share more misinformation. If you dig into the paper, you quickly find they rely on "professional fact checkers" to do so. As someone who has read a lot of fact checks that themselves need to be fact-checked, I can attest that this approach is likely deeply flawed.
They actually rely on the "trustworthiness" of different news sites, but that is itself based on the opinions of fact checkers. To quote this insane stupidity that passed as research: "Nonetheless, we find that Republican users in our dataset shared news from domains that were on
average rated as much more untrustworthy than Democratic users, based on either the fact-checker ratings or the politically-balanced layperson ratings."
This is nothing but a glorified credentials argument wrapped in a research paper! This is the kind of "intellectual" superiority" that you find on the left, unfortunately.
If you didn't only read conservative news maybe you'd know about canceled leftists. Actually you wouldn't know about canceled leftists since there is no left wing popular media. We have corporate media and equally powerful far right media. That's it.
You reference the dailywire so much when even your own source (mediabiasfactcheck) rates them just short of "extreme right" and rates their "Factual Reporting" as "MIXED"?
Why would anyone take the time to respond to each of your points any more than they would a random Facebook post?
This is part of what makes political discourse so challenging today. It's really easy to conjure up evidence in the form of poorly written articles with bad sources (or outright fabrications), but exponentially more difficult to go and fact check every one of these sources any time they are trotted out.
And, from your own wikipedia article: " A study published in Scientific Reports wrote: "While [Media Bias/Fact Check's] credibility is sometimes questioned, it has been regarded as accurate enough to be used as ground-truth." Thanks for the source! I love being given more material that backs my claims!
What does it mean to rigorously and objectively classify a news site as on the left or on the right? More importantly, what's your alternative classification system that is more objective and rigorous? It's so easy to criticize, and yet so hard to come up with something better. Again, you bring absolutely nothing to the conversation. How do you intend to convince anyone of anything?
>Thanks for the source! I love being given more material that backs my claims!
None of your dailywire claims have been backed up. You keep dodging that fact.
>Again, you bring absolutely nothing to the conversation.
All I'm trying to "bring to the conversation" is the fact that your "sources" are just links to a site nobody could possibly trust. But since that's clearly good enough for you to take as fact, you're exactly the kind of person they hope to rope in.
You're assuming the Daily wire is not a trustworthy source. I do not share that assumption. If you want to debunk them, do it yourself. Otherwise, they stand as solid supporting evidence!
>You're assuming the Daily wire is not a trustworthy source.
I'm not assuming anything, remember? That's according to the source you were crowing about.
>Thanks for the source! I love being given more material that backs my claims!
The folks at mediabiasfactcheck (which you've continuously defended) gave the Daily Wire a "Mixed" ranking for Factual Reporting. They couldn't even make it to "mostly factual" (which seems like a pretty low bar).
You're being very dishonest, and we both know it. If a news source is legitimately mixed in factual reporting, that would mean you can't assume what they are saying is false, because some of what they say is true by definition. But you just outright dismissed the entire site!
Anyways, you didn't actually catch me on anything. I knew long before that Daily Wire had a "mixed" rating on that site. I had also already clicked on all their examples of false reporting, and all of them were climate change-related articles from years ago where they found a scientist who disagreed with the reporting. So, uh, don't trust Daily wire for climate change articles?
From NPR: "The articles The Daily Wire publishes don’t normally include falsehoods (with some exceptions), and the site said it is committed to “truthful, accurate and ethical reporting.”"
Please come talk to me again when you're willing to have an honest discussion about a topic, and not when you're just trying, and failing, to score points.
I'll never understand how people can justify seeing the world in such binary terms. You don't honestly think someone is "bad" or "good" based on political ideology, do you?
It's easy to summarize the world in binary terms based on empirical evidence that comes from your own experiences. In my experience, conservatives are far more likely to back up their claims with evidence than those on the left. Is it always true? Of course not. But it certainly is a generalization I am convinced that is supported by reality.
The easiest way to get censored for ideological beliefs was to state that biological sex is a reality: https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-censors-tucker-carlso...
Babylon Bee got banned for harmless satire: https://www.dailywire.com/news/babylon-bee-a-factor-in-musk-...
Libs of tiktok was banned for "hate speech." I'm not sure they ever even let the account owner know exactly what was said that deserved censorship: https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-censors-popular-accou...
A classic is when the NY Post got locked out for posting factual information that the left wanted to bury before the 2020 election: https://www.dailywire.com/news/nypost-remains-locked-out-of-...
Twitter censored health experts whenever what they said didn't fit the COVID narrative put forth by the CDC: https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-censors-white-house-h...
There is still, today, multiple years after the start of the pandemic, no strong evidence that masks did anything significant to slow the spread of COVID. I can provide many citations if you need them. In fact, much of what big tech censored turned out to be true or still plausible today, like: the lab leak theory, natural immunity being more effective than the vaccine (even Bill Gates admits this now!), and so on.
James Lindsay got locked out for saying "OK groomer". https://www.dailywire.com/news/author-james-lindsay-banned-f...
Leftists have said many, many more vile and hateful things than that without suffering a single consequence, including making threats on others' lives: https://www.foxnews.com/media/libs-of-tik-tok-creator-twitte...