Originally published at: Right-wing lies do better on Facebook | Boing Boing
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Because what they write is more salacious and nutty, and therefore more engaging, or because conservatives are more likely to believe crazy things?
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Well, I don’t think it is inaccurately biased to say that the Right is more focused on what they can do TO others, not what they want to do FOR others. They want to get rid of large swaths of the population, people of color, non-christians, lgbt, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
So, they need justification to help them not die inside from the self-awareness that their fuel is pure, hateful evil. I think they are really hungry for any material that makes them the good guys. The more hateful they get, the more they need.
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“Facebook: It’s where the barely media & tech literate old people are.”
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That’s part of the story here as well. Younger people by and large just don’t use the platform to discuss politics and current events to the same degree that the over 60 crowd does.
I’d be interested to see a similar study on how right-wing lies and BS do on FB’s younger-skewing platform Instagram.
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As if we needed more evidence that Fbook is the true toilet of the internet. Thanks for removing all doubt.
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The liberal bias of reality is easy to explain. All Conservatism is, at its root, based upon some level of fetish for the past - the idolization of the conservative’s childhood, their parent’s accomplishments or - most often - the idyllic portrayal of some past time period on television. Conservatives oppose change. The problem is that all living things grow.
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Left-leaning folk can definitely fall for flim-flam. One only has to look to Goop or crystals or astrology or reiki massage or aura alignment or whatever cosmic thing that people might latch onto. But this bunkum tends to be couched in self- and universal love, not outrage, whereas right-wing hooey tends to be couched in indignation and outrage. And we know outrage is extremely engaging, which is why social media tends to push us that way. That would be my theory as to why right-wing poppycock is more ‘engaging’ than left-wing hogwash anyway.
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I didn’t consider demographics. That’s a good point.
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This is a good illustration of what I was getting at with those “journalistic integritry” checkers. They’re really just interested in politics and culture war stuff that can burn advertisers, so they don’t see lefty misinformation (or misinformed leftists) when it is less “political”, in the sense of what they consider “news”.
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Religion leans right, and religion makes children less able to differentiate fantasy from reality. At some point in life, those children raised with religion and a generous dose of American mega- church grifting, become adults who will believe anything that gives them a dopamine hit of rage.
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Because a lot of those memes are outrage generators and outrage = shares and comments.
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I’d put anti-vaxxers squarely in that category. Affluent liberals make up the second or third biggest subset of those idiots after right-wing Xtianists. It’s embarrassing, especially now.
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This is exactly why they love to use abortion as the wedge issue. Cruel and ineffective legislation that really only affects impoverished pregnant women allows the fundies and the crazies to simultaneously “own the libs” and “save the babies”.
Any attempts to point out the fact that no one loves abortion and that there are far more effective ways to reduce the number are ignored.
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Oh God yes, I’ve had supposed leftists tell me that vaccines cause autism and their citations are from flimsy articles on pubmed or those which that willfully misinterpret.
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You forgot the obligatory “Facebook must be destroyed.”
I remember back in 2016 when people all over Facebook were sharing “Denzel Washington endorses Trump!” or “Pope Francis endorses Trump!” What would the liberal version of that even look like, though? I can’t even imagine what kind of headline, real or fake, would get me excited enough to actually want to share it on Facebook.
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The fact that those are considered left wing shows how far to the right things have become. All of those are capitalist in nature. There may be socialist mutual aid reiki, aura or crystals groups out there, but I have yet to come across one.
Left wing misinformation tends to be along the lines of “There are no Uyghur camps in China”, or “Rojava is a tool of US imperialism”, and as organising the left is like herding cats there are a lot of left-wingers who disagree. Especially with Rojava, where the argument is actually Tankies complaining that they are doing socialism wrong by not siding with Russian imperialism (which is not socialism) and reluctantly fighting alongside the US rather than getting invaded by ISIS.
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I would have hoped that leftists in the West would see through the propaganda pushed by the “disgustingly capitalist except when it inconveniences us” Chinese Communist* Party.
*In name only. Seriously, the dog-eat-dog, every man for himself economy, the in-your face commercialism, the ostentatious consumption and the garish opulence on display in China’s cities while people in the countryside still live in abject poverty makes the USA look practically egalitarian by comparison.
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There’s always a small subset of tankies, Maoists and Stalinists in the West who like to pretend that China still has the Communist system it claims, or at least sees China as a counter-balance to Western capitalism that must be supported and believed. They’re far from the majority of leftists, but they are technically leftists in their ideology.
You’ll occasionally see something similar happening with Putin’s useful idiots. These types (in contrast to paid Russian tr0lls) are typically left-leaning in their politics but who constantly excuse or deny the existence of meddling in foreign elections and assassination of domestic political enemies because they hate the American capitalism and imperialism.
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Goop’s audience is primarily rich white ladies on Facebook - that is to say that that sort of hokum is spread all over the political spectrum and gathers in the marketed demographics. When you have bullshit to sell it’s usually just leaning into where the money is, which is how anti-vax has morphed into part of the Q nonsense and is used as an intro to QAnon. I guess affluent liberal dummies might have once started the ball rolling but these things get wider audiences and who follows it changes with the wider audience.
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