mindfu

mindfu t1_jb27x4u wrote

> The fairness doctrine only applied to media broadcast over public airwaves and worked to limit political discussion of controversial topics.

Sure, and also have that discourse be less inflammatory when discussed. The net bonus was a much less overheated political climate than what we have now, and also with much less misinformation.

Of course, to be effective nowadays a fairness doctrine would have to apply to non-airwaves broadcasting like cable and social media. That would be very complicated. But some way of limiting misinformation in particular is deeply needed.

>President's including Kennedy and Nixon used the fairness doctrine to try and silence dissenting opinions.

How was JFK using the fairness doctrine to silence dissent? Curious for more info.

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mindfu t1_jb10ad9 wrote

>Even this statement can be understood in multitude of different ways.

It's true that you can find ways to misunderstand it if you're looking to. That's separate from these kinds of statements having more than enough common understanding for this sort of social study.

If you were requiring this same level of resistance to alternate interpretation for all other well-known and generally agreed-upon terms in politics, pretty much no social study would be possible.

I think we've both laid our positions out pretty well, and know where each other stand. It doesn't seem like we're going to change each other's mind soon, so cheers and best.

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mindfu t1_jazj7cn wrote

> Not sure how you can disagree, the terms themselves have to be subjective since they are, by definition, relative.

They are subjective to the degree that anything involving human society isn't objective, sure. And also if politics means anything, and it does, then it's measurable enough to study. Clearly.

Ask a boomer or a zoomer which is more right wing, the GOP or the Democratic party, and you will get the GOP being right wing well more than 99.9% of the time. More than enough precision for this sort of study.

>it will be a while before we get reliable information since

About what? :) We're talking about memes that were published before 2020. We have that data.

>I not saying there isn’t more conservative centric info on Fb,

OK but that's not the point. The point is the memes that were right wing had noticeably more disinformation, by 5 to 8 times.

>I know there is also a tendency to put all Covid misinformed into the right/Republican bucket whatever the source.

OK, but that's also not what happened in this study.

>It wasn’t until post 2020 election that it really polarized that questioning the status quo on Covid was considered right wing.

No, that's not accurate. Conservative misinformation about vaccines started in 2019. Mid-year at the latest.

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mindfu t1_jazcf6d wrote

I didn't miss your point about left and right being an arbitrary distinction, I disagree with it. :-)

For beliefs before COVID, of course that's before COVID misinformation started. Once it started, it's pretty clear which political side was having more misinformation pushed on Facebook.

So I guess I think the methodology is clear enough. Nothing in politics or human psychology can be configured to the last decimal, but it's pretty clear at this point what the policies and opinions of the American right tend to be. And how they tend to be different from the American left.

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mindfu t1_jaz5j0n wrote

I suspect most by a big number. I know the couple of conservatives I have in my feed on Facebook communicate almost entirely in memes. And also, just the dumbest memes I've ever seen.

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mindfu t1_jaz5ds3 wrote

Reality is about the underlying truth.

If you want to be in step with reality, you have to want to be in step with the best evidence and expert review you can get.

There is no certainty, but you're better off digging for something that's observable rather than believing the real world doesn't matter. Or worse, that aspects of the real world outside yourself can change and be in step with whatever your favorite story is.

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mindfu t1_jaz50og wrote

What your analysis is missing there for antivaxx beliefs is the percentage of each side that believes in it. Both sides can show the problem, but they won't show the problem in equal amounts.

For example, maybe 5% of the left is anti-vaccine, versus now 40% of the right.

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mindfu t1_jaz4vi3 wrote

It's not that difficult if the misinformation is blatant. For example, anything implying vaccines don't work, or Fauci tried engineering covid with Bill Gates, and so forth.

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mindfu t1_jaz4px9 wrote

Yes, and that definitely is misleading.

Unless the entire GOP Congress was outwitted at the state of the Union by the senile man. Which certainly wouldn't speak well for the GOP Congress.

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mindfu t1_jaz4leb wrote

I'm looking for a transcript of Colbert's response. I haven't found it yet, but as I recall Colbert pointed out that it doesn't take a lab to cause venereal disease to spring out in Cancun during spring break. Even if the disease gets named after Cancun.

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