Most interesting to me is how common this is across demographic groups.
>Self‐ censorship is widespread across demographic groups as well. Nearly two‐ thirds of Latino Americans (65%) and White Americans (64%) and nearly half of African Americans (49%) have political views they are afraid to share. Majorities of men (65%) and women (59%), people with incomes over $100,000 (60%) and people with incomes less than $20,000 (58%), people under 35 (55%) and over 65 (66%), religious (71%) and non‐ religious (56%) all agree that the political climate prevents them from expressing their true beliefs.
Well as a POC, there's plenty of things I don't feel comfortable sharing. A lot is situational. It's really hard sharing anything that might make people realize they might not be as "progressive" as they think they are – regardless of where they are on the political spectrum.
Liberals are frequently unaware of their blind spots (but if you take care, they can be corrected). And then there's a swath of conservatives that don't think they're racist. If you should suggest it, it's too easy for them to dig themselves deeper into a hole.
All too frequently, I'll wish I stuck to non-political / comfortable topics – and remembered that political-correctness is there to protect me as an individual, so I can live in my bubble and get on with the day, even though PC-culture might be bad policy for society.
(D) might be in for the bigger surprise than the ones Upper East Siders saying "No one is going to vote for Nixon. I have all kinds of friends and none of them is pro-Nixon"
One thing that has slowly eroded American ideals (IMO) is the politicization of literally everything. Not only can you not have or share a "bad" thought on politics itself...but something completely unrelated to politics (that is now politicized) is also something you could be burned at the stake for. Then there are just people that share their politics openly and often to spite others.
We've essentially split into two Americas, one red and one blue. The people in the middle (which I generally identify with) are left in the cold...and not only are left in the cold but are attacked by both sides for not abiding by the doctrine. Honestly, the Left is the worst at this. They will actively try to ruin your life over wrongthink. I am much more likely to share a controversial opinion with someone on the Right than on the Left. But it's both sides, a local race here has a Republican attacking another Republican...for endorsing Romney in 2012. It's like I'm living in a bizarro world.
On the flip side, a lot of the more abhorrent things to come out of the current President's mouth are things that were clearly not politically-correct, that a lot of America has been holding back, that are now back in the open.
I'm not sure what the solution is. On one hand, it was there all along, and political-correctness did not help it. On the other hand, racists everywhere have been empowered once again, and all manner of groups have to face stereotypes they've fought so hard over the years. I don't think the U.S. will really get its house in order until it becomes an issue of survival, and of geopolitical importance.
Note however that one way to make a society appear to be less politically polarized is to silence the voice of groups who are not being served well by the current political status quo. When voices fighting for representation and fairness and equality are amplified, and supporters of the status quo resist (which they nearly always do), that will necessarily increase the apparent polarization, but I don't think that's a bad thing, and I certainly don't think it's worse than those voices remaining silenced.
yes, and in my opinion, this is one of the factors behind the abysmal pandemic response from the country as a whole. Bad ideas become good ideas if they come one's team and good ideas become bad if they are not. As a result both halves of the country do stupid things, different kinds of stupid of course, while at the same time both sides refuse to do reasonable things.
The counter to this though, is that the time when things weren't politicized was essentially when minority groups didn't have political, eoconomic, cultural power.
There is no new split into two Americas, there was always a split- between those who had political, cultural and economic power, and those that don't. The only difference now is that the people who are in the group with power aren't exclusively rich, white, conservative men.
We can go back, we can stop black people from getting loans and decent jobs, we can make all our women secretaries again, and I'm sure that will solve all our political ills.
It is dangerous that political differences are now being moralized. You vote for Biden? You're evil and should be fired. You vote for Trump? You're a Nazi and should be fired. Then what? What's the next step? I used to read about the French Revolution in horror. Parisans cheered when a Guillotine dropped, for they thought it was the righteous thing to do. And the history repeated itself in China 55 years ago and then 35 years ago, all in the name of upholding superior morality.
The idea that "everything is getting politicized" is more often an expression of the loss of normative dominance: ideas that you used to enjoy free of criticism and pushback are now subject to challenge. They haven't become politicized, they were always political. You just didn't have to justify them versus criticism.
The only sense in which horseshoe theory is real is that the rejection of the status quo tends to split someone in one direction or the other, and occasionally those new to alternative political ideologies will waffle or get shunted down different pipelines. Example: younger people going down the IDW pipeline who end up socialist once they realize the error. They don't return to dominant liberal narratives because they already figured out the ways in which they are toxic and false, and they also reject their previous pathway.
I can't imagine thinking that "bizarro world" is one in which people hold a larger diversity of opinion and criticize within a party.
It's been brewing since around 1970, plus or minus a few years.
What changed then? A lot of things. We can talk about the financial decoupling and tech, of course. But that was also when imported oil became a concern. It was when international shipping settled on a standard intermodal container. It was when the drug wars started. And it was after major victories in the civil rights movement, and failures in Vietnam. There were winners and losers in these changes. The big winners were neoliberal-progressives who could shape all these influences into a new political alignment that pleased globalizing businesses and placated the masses. The losers were the remnants of the supremacist structure post-Reconstruction, who had fell into a decline with the Depression and war years, and saw collapse in the 60's. They were ushered towards religion, nostalgia narratives about the good old days, and apocalyptic fiction about the decline of the world and those few who would stand up to it.
The problem that the neoliberal structure faced was the one politicians always face: how to accommodate a divided electorate and keep one's career? The formula that emerged was to force the talking points into a narrower spectrum, a tactic refined over the course of decades. In this space, policy change is blocked where it hurts private property interests(as neoliberalism indicates), and the remainder is a set-aside for partisanship where professionals craft pro and contra arguments.
But the consequence of doing that is a build-up of pressure on both left and right, as everything gradually becomes a property issue and gets blocked or deferred. With no enfranchisement, both have radicalized - first the right, and then the left in reaction.
And that's the state of things. How does it end? With a new coalition that courts all the defining forces of this era effectively, guided by some overarching ideology. However, if we take this to be a cycle as in Strauss-Howe's theory, this is simply the beginning of the neoliberal decline, a period of crisis management and compromise, not the defining of that coalition.
You're forgetting a group (that probably existed all along): many people simply don't care.
Also the fact that people actually feel the need to have bans on talking about politics eg at the workplace doesn't seem like a good sign to me, and that's hardly new at all.
It's pretty bad. I have friends that I can't really talk to about politics because they're super on board with trump, and other friends that I need to avoid the topic with because they're so committed to socialism. It's mostly when we speak online where people just feel free to be the shittiest just because you're talking to them over chat instead of to their faces.
> Honestly, the Left is the worst at this. They will actively try to ruin your life over wrongthink.
This experience must vary a lot with your locale. I live in a medium sized town in Canada and feel very uncomfortable talking to my conservative, suburban neighbours about issues I strongly believe should be a priority for everyone. Like climate change.
They know that them and me don’t see eye to eye on these issues but I can’t bring it up in a way that I would with my left leaning friends and it pains me. Because it’s something that both sides of the political spectrum should be able to rally behind. Many conservatives here fancy themselves as sort of “salt of the earth people” so I don’t get the hostility towards some kind of conservation.
It's generally easier to play the role of the Very Reasonable Person Who's Just Asking Questions when you're defending the status quo; any change you stymie by undercutting people's emotional energy or by slowing things down works to your advantage.
Then it is time to create a formal, enforceable separation between person and profession. That is, what one does personally is taken separately from professional conduct and vice versa.
I was raised in a conservative family. My views have shifted greatly leftward over the last 20 years. I avoid sharing my views at work not because I am afraid for myself, but because I don't want to make conservative colleagues of mine feel unwelcome. I prioritize their comfort in our shared work environment over the enjoyment I would derive from a vigorous political argument. We are there together to work on difficult technical and business problems -- not to solve (or even define) what needs changing in American political life. If I want to talk politics, I'll jump into the comments section of a blog.
Is there a baseline for how high this was in the past other than the mentioned 58% a few years ago in the article?
I can't imagine that there wasn't substantial amounts of this during say, the heights of McCarthyism or when gay-rights weren't as accepted. Not to mention another interesting meta question, are people nowadays more prone to share that they feel like they cannot express their opinion?
My grandparents for example have it so ingrained to not question religious belief that they probably wouldn't even perceive it that way. Or just women in general. The stereotypical "housewife" only a few decades ago wasn't participating in public discourse at all and certainly not expected to. With the exception of a few high profile intellectuals women were mostly excluded from political life. I have a hard time even comparing this to today.
I think a big part of this is that the definition of "say" has changed dramatically in the past decade.
Today, people interpret that to mean, in part at least, "broadcast on the Internet where I have no control over the audience and where it will be recorded digitally and available indefinitely".
10-20 years ago "saying" just meant verbalizing something around a handful of people you could see. You'd know who you were talking to, and if you said something dumb, human memory and time would soften its edges eventually.
Ask people in the 1990s if they would self-censor themselves when appearing on TV and they'd probably say yes at the same rate that people say they self-censor when "talking" today, in large part because computers are such a large medium of communication now.
> "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor" - Desmond Tutu
I don't really like this quote.
It starts off with a false premise, because neutrality is required in order to have justice. A neutral assessment of oppression is that it's wrong.
What Desmond Tutu is really getting at is that so-called "neutrality" which defends the status quo when the status quo is oppression is wrong. But that's not what actual neutrality would do.
And then the quote gets put forth to quash demands for actual neutrality as illegitimate, even when the people in need of it are the victims rather than the oppressors.
Makes sense to me. No one wants to get burned at the social media stake. It feels no matter where you land on the political arena you're liable to get reamed by those who think your views are too strong or not strong enough.
This is nothing to do with the political climate of the US in 2020, it's very much to do with the fact that formative experiences early in my career very strongly influenced the prior that work and personal lives are streams that shall not be crossed, and coworkers are not to be trusted.
Does it not concern you that a significant portion of those surveyed think it’s okay to fire someone for their (financial) support of a political candidate? You don’t have to talk about it for people to find out — it’s part public record if you are contributing more than $200.
It's not just what you don't say, you're also expected to say certain things. I feel like the system at work compels people to believe certain things if they want to stay employed.
I keep most not directly work related talk out of work. Not because I think they must not be crossed, or because I'm afraid of someone disagreeing (I'm also fairly far left, so plenty of my views are en vouge at the moment), but because usually there is no time for any nuanced discussions during work hours, so it just ends up being people throwing rehashed phrases at each other while passing by.
I'll happely meet a co-worker over lunch/dinner to discuss things more deeply.
But since over time the workplaces is inevitably shaped by the society it is in, in my opinion we might as well try figure out ways to deal with broader issues while at work, instead of pretending they are isolated. (I'm not saying I have a good solution of how this would look like.)
Every discussion of free speech in the US seems to conveniently elide how much control employers have over employees, including the ability to take away their healthcare from them for speech that doesn’t even broach the political. Disagree with your boss too much and good luck paying for your kid’s doctor’s appointments.
Cancel culture is tedious moralizing, but mostly a media spectacle meant to drive attention to various figures and platforms. The average worker has more to fear from those who sign their paychecks than anyone else.
If the majority hide their political views then there is no way to engage with them and ever present your side on issues.
Which migh sound bad but is actually a natural response to being forcefully fed extreme ends of political stances.
So the debate over media and internet missinformation might be for nothing. People adapt arround obstacles. In the end there could only be bots responding to bots and campaign members patting eachother on the back for the number of likes the bots generated.
> If the majority hide their political views then there is no way to engage with them and ever present your side on issues.
Was this ever true? Do the majority of companies encourage talk about religion or the majority of churches encourage talk about politics?
The people react to stimuli like {media, campaigns, bots} just like they do any other marketing: there is a game theory response to stimuli. If they get overwhelmed on one platform, they will change habits (eg. move to a different platform, discuss only in person where there are no bots, discuss these topics less). I suspect campaigns have been around long enough that more people (with the help of information widely distributed on the internet) have gained a different tolerance to the same old campaign tricks.
Looking at the methodology it looks like a reasonably conducted survey, but it has a basic methodological flaw: it cannot distinguish between any particular models, such as "a privileged group oppressing contrary beliefs" versus "the peace treaty of tolerance is functioning and bigots must suppress their beliefs to keep its protections." Further, the causes of self censorship need not be identical. Both of the two models I just posited can be in play at the same time in various subpopulations and around various issues. And there are lots of group/individual relations you can posit for this. Social science is hard.
So this data set might be an interesting preliminary trial, but releasing it as a finished study is either sloppy or malicious on the part of the Cato Institute.
Edit: Reading the other comments on here, I'm inclined towards malicious as it seems spun to create just the kind of rhetoric that we're seeing here.
Interesting...I wonder if there was an implied context for the survey. I think there is a difference between saying something in a discussion between friends over a cup of coffee/glass of beer and putting something in an email or social media of any kind (i.e. anything that leaves a permanent record without the full context of the discussion and crucially missing any non-verbal cues).
Is it wrong to say some beliefs should be "shamed away"?
The thing is, aside from traditional liberal and conservative views, it has been documented how the Internet gives play to a variety of essentially delusional belief systems; flat-earth, anti-vax, 5G fears, "crisis actor" conspiracies, etc. Basically, things that in earlier times someone might imagine one day but give up through realizing that their friends and neighbors might (correctly) think they were crazy if they continued to entertain such idea.
And this isn't to say such ideas are absolutely distinct from political ideas - just about any type of delusion is now given a particular kind of political spin since the committedly delusional are an easily directed group.
The situation is - once people got their ideas from the neighbors and maybe their schools and churches. Gradually, they came to also get their ideas from mass media. This was already somewhat artificial but at least it kept a single social authority. Now, people get their ideas from mass media and "the Internet"("dispersed", "narrow-cast" media), with mass media struggling to keep up some unity of beliefs (though mass media itself easily cast as a manipulator of its own sort).
The political environment in the USA is interesting. Common thought is that the media and general sentiment on social media are representative of the countries overall opinion.
But this is not really true, people arent as swayed as the internet likes to believe. It's a giant fabricated hive mind, where a ton of people feel adversarial towards the commonly held opinions, which are in fact, not commonly held.
Cancel culture has quenched political discussion. It’s impossible to share views, even among coworkers you might consider friends, without serious risk to one’s employment.
The effect is likely more polarization since we cannot moderate each other’s opinions with stories of our own experiences.
This doesn't surprise me. I am also afraid to express myself for fear of being rejected by most of my friends or excluded from my professional network.
It is sad that I can only be honest and say things such as "let's wait for the facts" under a nickname on some dark corner of the web.
I think there needs to be a distinction between political ideas and political ideologies. Especially in the United States, where there's an obsession between the GOP and the DCCC, even though neither political party represents a majority.
When you ask respondents on political ideas, like voting rights, immigration, state welfare, infrastructure, etc, a much broader and more moderate viewpoint emerges.
Also there seems to be a more growing disconnect between people in power and the masses. I think as data science becomes a more developed craft, more people will become aware about the motivations of our political actors. Sensationalism and political correctness are usually signs of a deeper problem---
Perhaps if the choices were not stark, perhaps if you werene't staring down the barrel of calamity, perhaps if America didn't have the capability to inflict immense suffering around the world or make a huge positive contribution, perhaps if political changes didn't directly affect your livelihood, perhaps if which rights you had and how much violence could be directed at you didn't depend on the politicians in power - perhaps - then we wouldn't need to worry about politics, and could talk about it as if it were the weather.
>The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive
With the 62% includes anyone who "strongly agrees" or "somewhat agrees."
I would answer "somewhat agrees" to that question, not because I'm afraid to share my beliefs but that I don't want to discuss the topic or I'm not knowledgeable enough to have confidence discussing my beliefs.
If someone says something racist, they are exercising free speech.
If someone in return calls that out for being racist, and shames them, they are ALSO exercising free speech.
So long as the government does not punish either of them, noone's Free Speech is being compromised.
But the outcome of this exchange is that the first person is going to claim repression then vote in this survey and say they are afraid to share their political views.
Frankly, the only problem I see is people's inability to introspect.
[+] [-] Wohlf|5 years ago|reply
>Self‐ censorship is widespread across demographic groups as well. Nearly two‐ thirds of Latino Americans (65%) and White Americans (64%) and nearly half of African Americans (49%) have political views they are afraid to share. Majorities of men (65%) and women (59%), people with incomes over $100,000 (60%) and people with incomes less than $20,000 (58%), people under 35 (55%) and over 65 (66%), religious (71%) and non‐ religious (56%) all agree that the political climate prevents them from expressing their true beliefs.
[+] [-] lambdasquirrel|5 years ago|reply
Liberals are frequently unaware of their blind spots (but if you take care, they can be corrected). And then there's a swath of conservatives that don't think they're racist. If you should suggest it, it's too easy for them to dig themselves deeper into a hole.
All too frequently, I'll wish I stuck to non-political / comfortable topics – and remembered that political-correctness is there to protect me as an individual, so I can live in my bubble and get on with the day, even though PC-culture might be bad policy for society.
[+] [-] notyourday|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partiallypro|5 years ago|reply
We've essentially split into two Americas, one red and one blue. The people in the middle (which I generally identify with) are left in the cold...and not only are left in the cold but are attacked by both sides for not abiding by the doctrine. Honestly, the Left is the worst at this. They will actively try to ruin your life over wrongthink. I am much more likely to share a controversial opinion with someone on the Right than on the Left. But it's both sides, a local race here has a Republican attacking another Republican...for endorsing Romney in 2012. It's like I'm living in a bizarro world.
Horseshoe theory is real.
[+] [-] lambdasquirrel|5 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what the solution is. On one hand, it was there all along, and political-correctness did not help it. On the other hand, racists everywhere have been empowered once again, and all manner of groups have to face stereotypes they've fought so hard over the years. I don't think the U.S. will really get its house in order until it becomes an issue of survival, and of geopolitical importance.
[+] [-] baddox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zarkov99|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Traster|5 years ago|reply
There is no new split into two Americas, there was always a split- between those who had political, cultural and economic power, and those that don't. The only difference now is that the people who are in the group with power aren't exclusively rich, white, conservative men.
We can go back, we can stop black people from getting loans and decent jobs, we can make all our women secretaries again, and I'm sure that will solve all our political ills.
[+] [-] hintymad|5 years ago|reply
Are we going to repeat the history in the US?
[+] [-] shirakawasuna|5 years ago|reply
The only sense in which horseshoe theory is real is that the rejection of the status quo tends to split someone in one direction or the other, and occasionally those new to alternative political ideologies will waffle or get shunted down different pipelines. Example: younger people going down the IDW pipeline who end up socialist once they realize the error. They don't return to dominant liberal narratives because they already figured out the ways in which they are toxic and false, and they also reject their previous pathway.
I can't imagine thinking that "bizarro world" is one in which people hold a larger diversity of opinion and criticize within a party.
[+] [-] megameter|5 years ago|reply
What changed then? A lot of things. We can talk about the financial decoupling and tech, of course. But that was also when imported oil became a concern. It was when international shipping settled on a standard intermodal container. It was when the drug wars started. And it was after major victories in the civil rights movement, and failures in Vietnam. There were winners and losers in these changes. The big winners were neoliberal-progressives who could shape all these influences into a new political alignment that pleased globalizing businesses and placated the masses. The losers were the remnants of the supremacist structure post-Reconstruction, who had fell into a decline with the Depression and war years, and saw collapse in the 60's. They were ushered towards religion, nostalgia narratives about the good old days, and apocalyptic fiction about the decline of the world and those few who would stand up to it.
The problem that the neoliberal structure faced was the one politicians always face: how to accommodate a divided electorate and keep one's career? The formula that emerged was to force the talking points into a narrower spectrum, a tactic refined over the course of decades. In this space, policy change is blocked where it hurts private property interests(as neoliberalism indicates), and the remainder is a set-aside for partisanship where professionals craft pro and contra arguments.
But the consequence of doing that is a build-up of pressure on both left and right, as everything gradually becomes a property issue and gets blocked or deferred. With no enfranchisement, both have radicalized - first the right, and then the left in reaction.
And that's the state of things. How does it end? With a new coalition that courts all the defining forces of this era effectively, guided by some overarching ideology. However, if we take this to be a cycle as in Strauss-Howe's theory, this is simply the beginning of the neoliberal decline, a period of crisis management and compromise, not the defining of that coalition.
[+] [-] efreak|5 years ago|reply
Also the fact that people actually feel the need to have bans on talking about politics eg at the workplace doesn't seem like a good sign to me, and that's hardly new at all.
[+] [-] wombat-man|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abraxas|5 years ago|reply
This experience must vary a lot with your locale. I live in a medium sized town in Canada and feel very uncomfortable talking to my conservative, suburban neighbours about issues I strongly believe should be a priority for everyone. Like climate change.
They know that them and me don’t see eye to eye on these issues but I can’t bring it up in a way that I would with my left leaning friends and it pains me. Because it’s something that both sides of the political spectrum should be able to rally behind. Many conservatives here fancy themselves as sort of “salt of the earth people” so I don’t get the hostility towards some kind of conservation.
[+] [-] the_resistence|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erichocean|5 years ago|reply
This was literally Hitler's primary argument for establishing the Nazi Party in Mein Kampf in the way that he did. So at least a 100 years old.
Based on the results, there's a pretty strong argument that it's true.
[+] [-] cmxch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theplague42|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wry_discontent|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] TomSwirly|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] doubletgl|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bsder|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jakkyboi|5 years ago|reply
I'm sorry - once in a while bad things happen and a choice must be made.
[+] [-] betenoire|5 years ago|reply
I've never ruined anyone
Those are the very kind of toxic comments we need to get away from
[+] [-] philipkglass|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|5 years ago|reply
I can't imagine that there wasn't substantial amounts of this during say, the heights of McCarthyism or when gay-rights weren't as accepted. Not to mention another interesting meta question, are people nowadays more prone to share that they feel like they cannot express their opinion?
My grandparents for example have it so ingrained to not question religious belief that they probably wouldn't even perceive it that way. Or just women in general. The stereotypical "housewife" only a few decades ago wasn't participating in public discourse at all and certainly not expected to. With the exception of a few high profile intellectuals women were mostly excluded from political life. I have a hard time even comparing this to today.
[+] [-] munificent|5 years ago|reply
Today, people interpret that to mean, in part at least, "broadcast on the Internet where I have no control over the audience and where it will be recorded digitally and available indefinitely".
10-20 years ago "saying" just meant verbalizing something around a handful of people you could see. You'd know who you were talking to, and if you said something dumb, human memory and time would soften its edges eventually.
Ask people in the 1990s if they would self-censor themselves when appearing on TV and they'd probably say yes at the same rate that people say they self-censor when "talking" today, in large part because computers are such a large medium of communication now.
[+] [-] kgraves|5 years ago|reply
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor" - Desmond Tutu
And being silent is not even an option, because now "silence is violence".
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|5 years ago|reply
I don't really like this quote.
It starts off with a false premise, because neutrality is required in order to have justice. A neutral assessment of oppression is that it's wrong.
What Desmond Tutu is really getting at is that so-called "neutrality" which defends the status quo when the status quo is oppression is wrong. But that's not what actual neutrality would do.
And then the quote gets put forth to quash demands for actual neutrality as illegitimate, even when the people in need of it are the victims rather than the oppressors.
[+] [-] sosuke|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs02rm0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hprotagonist|5 years ago|reply
This is nothing to do with the political climate of the US in 2020, it's very much to do with the fact that formative experiences early in my career very strongly influenced the prior that work and personal lives are streams that shall not be crossed, and coworkers are not to be trusted.
[+] [-] kelchm|5 years ago|reply
Seems insane to me.
[+] [-] giantg2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoe|5 years ago|reply
I'll happely meet a co-worker over lunch/dinner to discuss things more deeply.
But since over time the workplaces is inevitably shaped by the society it is in, in my opinion we might as well try figure out ways to deal with broader issues while at work, instead of pretending they are isolated. (I'm not saying I have a good solution of how this would look like.)
[+] [-] claudeganon|5 years ago|reply
Cancel culture is tedious moralizing, but mostly a media spectacle meant to drive attention to various figures and platforms. The average worker has more to fear from those who sign their paychecks than anyone else.
[+] [-] trabant00|5 years ago|reply
Which migh sound bad but is actually a natural response to being forcefully fed extreme ends of political stances.
So the debate over media and internet missinformation might be for nothing. People adapt arround obstacles. In the end there could only be bots responding to bots and campaign members patting eachother on the back for the number of likes the bots generated.
[+] [-] thephyber|5 years ago|reply
Was this ever true? Do the majority of companies encourage talk about religion or the majority of churches encourage talk about politics?
The people react to stimuli like {media, campaigns, bots} just like they do any other marketing: there is a game theory response to stimuli. If they get overwhelmed on one platform, they will change habits (eg. move to a different platform, discuss only in person where there are no bots, discuss these topics less). I suspect campaigns have been around long enough that more people (with the help of information widely distributed on the internet) have gained a different tolerance to the same old campaign tricks.
[+] [-] madhadron|5 years ago|reply
So this data set might be an interesting preliminary trial, but releasing it as a finished study is either sloppy or malicious on the part of the Cato Institute.
Edit: Reading the other comments on here, I'm inclined towards malicious as it seems spun to create just the kind of rhetoric that we're seeing here.
[+] [-] chosenbreed37|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|5 years ago|reply
The thing is, aside from traditional liberal and conservative views, it has been documented how the Internet gives play to a variety of essentially delusional belief systems; flat-earth, anti-vax, 5G fears, "crisis actor" conspiracies, etc. Basically, things that in earlier times someone might imagine one day but give up through realizing that their friends and neighbors might (correctly) think they were crazy if they continued to entertain such idea.
And this isn't to say such ideas are absolutely distinct from political ideas - just about any type of delusion is now given a particular kind of political spin since the committedly delusional are an easily directed group.
The situation is - once people got their ideas from the neighbors and maybe their schools and churches. Gradually, they came to also get their ideas from mass media. This was already somewhat artificial but at least it kept a single social authority. Now, people get their ideas from mass media and "the Internet"("dispersed", "narrow-cast" media), with mass media struggling to keep up some unity of beliefs (though mass media itself easily cast as a manipulator of its own sort).
[+] [-] stormdennis|5 years ago|reply
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/...
[+] [-] logicslave|5 years ago|reply
But this is not really true, people arent as swayed as the internet likes to believe. It's a giant fabricated hive mind, where a ton of people feel adversarial towards the commonly held opinions, which are in fact, not commonly held.
[+] [-] stmfreak|5 years ago|reply
The effect is likely more polarization since we cannot moderate each other’s opinions with stories of our own experiences.
[+] [-] DevKoala|5 years ago|reply
It is sad that I can only be honest and say things such as "let's wait for the facts" under a nickname on some dark corner of the web.
[+] [-] supergrumpybear|5 years ago|reply
When you ask respondents on political ideas, like voting rights, immigration, state welfare, infrastructure, etc, a much broader and more moderate viewpoint emerges.
Also there seems to be a more growing disconnect between people in power and the masses. I think as data science becomes a more developed craft, more people will become aware about the motivations of our political actors. Sensationalism and political correctness are usually signs of a deeper problem---
[+] [-] pradn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|5 years ago|reply
>The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive
With the 62% includes anyone who "strongly agrees" or "somewhat agrees."
I would answer "somewhat agrees" to that question, not because I'm afraid to share my beliefs but that I don't want to discuss the topic or I'm not knowledgeable enough to have confidence discussing my beliefs.
[+] [-] deanCommie|5 years ago|reply
If someone says something racist, they are exercising free speech.
If someone in return calls that out for being racist, and shames them, they are ALSO exercising free speech.
So long as the government does not punish either of them, noone's Free Speech is being compromised.
But the outcome of this exchange is that the first person is going to claim repression then vote in this survey and say they are afraid to share their political views.
Frankly, the only problem I see is people's inability to introspect.