'The end of Trump': how Facebook deepens millennials' confirmation bias | US news | The... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...ook-politics-bias-social-media
facebook trump millennials confirmation bias confirmation bias social media politics culture
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“Among millennials, especially,” Douthat argues, “there’s a growing constituency for whom rightwing ideas are so alien or triggering, leftwing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”
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Unlike Twitter – or real life – where interaction with those who disagree with you on political matters is an inevitability, Facebook users can block, mute and unfriend any outlet or person that will not further bolster their current worldview.
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Even Facebook itself sees the segmentation of users along political lines on its site - and synchronizes it not only with the posts users see, but with the advertisements they’re shown.
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Test it out yourself: Go to facebook.com/ads/preferences on your browser and click the “Lifestyle and Culture” tab under the “Interests” banner. You see the box titled “US Politics”? It’s followed with a parenthetical notation of your political alignment, from “Very Conservative” to “Very Liberal”.
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Sites such as US Uncut, Occupy Democrats, Addicting Info, Make America Great and The Other 98% may barely have homepages, but their Facebook pages are rich with millions of followers and sky-high engagement – in many cases higher than many mainstream news outlets combined
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“News sources” – largely aggregators of video clips and interviews from other sites – that barely exist beyond the sharing economy of Facebook have arisen as major players in the site’s political news sphere.
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Occupy Democrats, a far-left page popular with supporters of onetime Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, has 3.8 million likes on its Facebook page. MSNBC, another left-leaning outlet with far wider reach outside of Facebook, has a mere 1.6 million.