Comment on Is social media fuelling political polarisation?
bobc7@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Social Media. The platforms built originally to keep us connected and able to share knowledge with one another instantaneously. Has now been hijacked by corporations and governments as a method of controlling us.
Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
We also do it to ourselves. Everyone has someone in their life they’d rather mute. But they’re forced to coexist with them. Online is so appealing because you can find communities of like minded individuals. Then forget all about those other opinions you don’t like.
You grow in this bubble as they grow in theirs. By the next time you’re forced to interact, you feel so alien and unpleasant to one another it’s confusing and frightening. Corporations are right there to sell you on a story about how the other side are demons destroying the world. We gobble it up.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Groups with just things we agree with wouldn’t explain it. What happens is we go into groups of people we agree with and then post memes about the other side that everyone agrees with. We get a caricature of the opposition that is reinforced.
As evidence, just look how much news about Trump gets posted to liberal places. If you don’t want to hear about him that’s the last place you should go.
Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
It’s still ideas the group agrees with. The idea is: that we all disagree with this idea. It’s subtle, until you look at the same story on CNN vs Fox. Two bubbles discussing the same issue with two VERY different emotional valences.
To put it another way: the discussion of these ideas that are oppositional to the community, is not with the intention of seriously considering them. It’s with the intention of dismissing them in a group act of catharsis. It maintains the bubble and safely dispatches an idea that threatened to burst it.