Expanding the Echo Chamber

[Mike]

[Tahlvin]

I try to get a balance of hate from both sides in my news sources.

On Dan Carlin's recommendation, I follow Glenn Greenwald. He seems pretty willing to hold both sides accountable.

[Kyle]

Another thing I did was go into facebook and refollow everyone I had unfollowed.

[Phoebe]

I'm linking to the complaint here rather than the interviews because I am absolutely astounded to my core by the recent flurry of fluff pieces on the leaders of the white supremacist movement, which permit the subjects to offer gentle quotes justifying their views, with minimal examination of the actual views themselves. Instead, I'd check out one of their YouTube videos so you can get the real messages. We all need to know the truth and a vanity-fair style puff piece does not deliver that. Once you know their ideological foundation, you will see why Bannon is appealing to an obscure thinker you'd never heard of, and why certain laws are objected to, certain names and nicknames and buzzwords repeated. Then you'll know for sure why Trump is their guy; it wasn't a lucky coincidence of a few goals.

One way of getting out of the bubble is to figure out why people with a direct line to the WH argue the 19th Amendment should go, or why they hate and fear Jews so much. Please recall this was part of Trump's actual campaign ads and retweets; not separate, distant supporters. I think most people are deep in the bubble on what's happening with white nationalism; they aren't the weird, ugly Deutschophiles and skinheads we saw occasionally in the past who appealed to pretty much no one. The new ones have very smart leaders who know how to market a sense of fun belonging.

Edited to add other echo chamber thoughts:
I have a major issue here because for a long time I tried to look only at news services (e.g. AP, Reuters), and they made terrible mistakes during the election season. They didn't correct for the mistakes! Ultimately there's a human being on the other end who isn't doing the job very well. When you can't trust basic news services to stick to facts rather than editorializing or using their reporting of facts as a means of trying to influence the narrative, it's a huge problem. And now we have our President-Elect in an ongoing twitter war with the NYT (and the WaPo and USAToday, among others). The good side of this conflict is that the WaPo and USAToday have been doing a lot of terrific reporting, apparently having decided either to make a stand for honesty or else resigned to the fact that they face the same legal issues no matter what they choose, so they might as well let 'er rip.

My attempt to counteract this type of problem is to gather news from a wide variety of fact-based sources, including lots of local news. A lot of times the local reporters will include really important information because the tentacles of the corporate master that wants to remove or spin that information haven't penetrated down far enough, or the story is going to stay local. On a national level, most mainstream and supposedly straightforward news has so much editorializing, I have to wonder what the fuck is going on in j-schools across the nation. I don't think the major problem is a liberal/conservative tilt so much as an overall Corporate and Status-Quo tilt. The only way you are going to find out what is actually going on in Standing Rock, for instance, is to read reports from independent journalists. Since reality has a notable political slant, you're not going to find many reliable outlets to achieve political "balance" on this issue. Of course, that kind of balance isn't really balanced or truth-promoting at all, so that's irrelevant. On other issues, I have found that libertarian journalists and think-tanks often do a pretty decent job of assembling facts. Perhaps their very confidence in interpreting these facts differently and correctly permits them to report facts without blinking, where other outlets simply deny reality.

If there is one thing that terrifies me most after the past year, it's the ability of journalists to report on Not-F, where F is an easily verifiable fact, or even to insist on Not-F themselves after F has clearly emerged. In a world ruled by Not-F, we are fucked. Getting back to local news on that front: it's fascinating to read local reports on things like "why are the streets here always so full of water" and "why is the nuclear power plant actually closing"? Info slips out that would not be permitted into a broader national narrative presented to you by e.g. the networks, cable, big newspapers, or even basic news services. Strangely, the nuclear power plant just hasn't been the same since a historic flood event! And that would not be part of the official story today. Strangely, the Florida town is working overtime to find solutions to its chronic flooding problems, but larger reports on climate change wouldn't want to mention that sea level rise is already an issue. I mean, I think we're fucked. That's where it rests.

[Phoebe]

Here's instructive example: mainstream outlets now finally reporting on the use of water cannons on protestors in the below freezing temps at Standing Rock. You will see a blurry, confused video and read or hear claims that the protestors were setting fires on a bridge and were aggressively attacking the police. That sounds like a reason to use a water cannon, right? Except there's no actual evidence of ANY OF THAT. If all these things occurred, why so hard to demonstrate?

But then if you look at the actual drone footage, clear as a bell, shot from above the protest site, you see that the fires were not on the bridge (and how are they supposed to stay warm out there without bonfires, one wonders?), that the water cannons were not simply firehoses on trucks but were mounted on some sort of tank, and were being used directly on the protestors at short range, and that they tried to shoot down the drone with a water cannon. So...

We're in the post-truth, post-facts age in the media. Thank God the truth and facts themselves are still there, bedrock style.

[El Jefe]

[Mike]

Facebook for me involves friends and acquaintances, but it also includes family and extended family that you feel obligated to include, some work acquaintances, and some contacts that you don't want to lose contact with for other reasons. There's a mix. Most people I follow on Facebook include at least occasional political commentary, if not several posts a day of it. Most people are passing along jokes that I find idiotic. Most people are passing around new quizzes and activities "just for fun." Occasional prayers. Begging for attention. Miscellaneous.

I would guess that around 10% or less of what comes through my feed is something I would consider engaging. Less than 1% for sure qualifies and genuinely interesting/important. If I went for 3 weeks without looking at my Facebook feed, I would miss nothing but occasional pictures of family and friends.

"Important" communication takes place in other venues... here, email, Facebook Messenger mostly. So my Facebook feed is for maintaining a presence and for a fast shortcut to browsing information that might be interesting to me.

Refollowing people was easy for me. I don't consider them "toxic" necessarily (although some could be considered that), but no matter how much I cultivate my feed, there's always stuff that comes through that I don't agree with or would rather not see. You learn to skim past it and ignore it. So if I refollow these people and don't want to read their stuff, I don't have to. But at least now I have the option if I want to get a sense of what they are thinking. Most of their disagreeable stuff is just links to far-right news outlets. Rarely do they actually SAY anything disagreeable. They just link to it.

The only person I left unfollowed was one elderly vague relation on my wife's side whose feed is nothing but shares of prayers all day long. Most of them of the nature of "please pray for ___________", where ___________ is someone that she doesn't even know, but she passes it along because it's a prayer request.

[El Jefe]

That'd be why there's a disconnect. My list is kept small on purpose. I'll follow a few folks that aren't friends, but that's a list you have to earn a spot on. There's plenty of blood family that isn't on there. There's plenty of posts sequestered to particular segments of the list. It's as much my ranting space as anything else. Friends and coworkers that make that cut need to be people I will actually spend time with outside of work on a semi-regular basis.

Also, I generally don't feel any obligation to extended family...pretty much ever. If you're family (note, family...not blood. Friends make that cut as well), I'll pick up tomorrow if you say you want us to take up gunrunning. If you're not family, then you're not. I don't give a damn what your blood relation is.

[Phoebe]

[Phoebe]

The latest shooting from this morning is the kind of thing that will immediately show up as politics (both ways) on Facebook. There are people who wouldn't send their kids to play at my house if they thought we owned guns, and there are people whose houses I would be nervous about sending my kids to play at because they own guns and seem pretty freewheeling about it compared to, say, my parents.