Political Bias Online claim

[CharonY]

On 8/30/2018 at 5:43 AM, Ten oz said:

Quality of information has always been an issue. I don't think there was really ever a time when information was presented truest as it could be. Books are full of as much propaganda and inaccuracies as are things on the internet today.

I agree. The challenge in the modern world is that the number of (convenient) sources have massively increased. Evaluating quality has become more difficult as there are more sources that can repeat and reinforce false claims. That in itself is not new. But the speed and sheer amount of it makes since difficult.

 

On 8/30/2018 at 5:43 AM, Ten oz said:

This will seem ageist but I think part of the problem is that people above the age of 45 don't understand how the internet works.

Quite possible. Though of course it helps if it feeds a narrative that folks already believe in. And to be fair, I do see plenty of younger folks falling into same trap. While not that frequent, there are more and more students (in off-topic discussion) use facebook videos as indication of certain things happening with little critical afterthought. I a way there seems to be a young subgroup that believe that traditional journalism is biased on that "citizen journalism" is the best way to get to the real facts. And as you outlined before, those videos (and for the most part it really seems to be videos) are getting popular not because they actually did a stellar job in reporting, but because they got the most clicks.

[iNow]

On 8/30/2018 at 6:43 AM, Ten oz said:

This will seem ageist but I think part of the problem is that people above the age of 45 don't understand how the internet works.

You need to caveat this with a word like “many” or “most I’ve encountered” or even just “seem to not understand how the internet works.”

Maybe the 45+ year old folks YOU know don’t understand the internet, but there are tens of thousands of post-45 year olds I work with who understand it better than you and me both combined. 

It seems ageist because it is. 

As for the topic, am I the only one who finds it crazy that Trump is talking now about fairness on the internet after his own damned administration has attacked and sought to block net neutrality from multiple angles?

[Ten oz]

14 minutes ago, iNow said:

Maybe the 45+ year old folks YOU know don’t understand the internet, but there are tens of thousands of post-45 year olds I work with who understand it better than you and me both combined. 

The doesn't read as being anymore something you can substantiate than what I posted.

[iNow]

Well, we could see if they’d like to take a test and then compare their answers to yours and mine. We’d lose. I promise, but will stipulate it’s opinion in current form. 

[CharonY]

I dislike the 45 year cut-off for... personal reasons.

[Ten oz]

4 hours ago, iNow said:

Well, we could see if they’d like to take a test and then compare their answers to yours and mine. We’d lose. I promise, but will stipulate it’s opinion in current form. 

Ben Carson would test better on a biology exam than either of us, so what. People can know lots of facts yet still have beliefs and behaviors contrary to those facts. The way one interacts with, preceives, and emotionally responds to online information isn't necessarily driven by their knowledge. 

24 minutes ago, CharonY said:

I dislike the 45 year cut-off for... personal reasons.

I went with 45 because the internet wasn't publicly accessable till 94'. So if one graduated high school prior to 94' they grew up, through to adulthood, without the internet.

I bought my first computer, as an adult, in 1997. I didn't have internet in my home until about 03' give or take a year. I held out getting internet because I viewed it as an expensive luxury, lol. My wife is a several years younger than I am. She had the internet through high school and in home her whole adult life. Early in our relationship following a move and job change I once suggested not getting the internet in home to save money and she basically laughed in face. 

[iNow]

The point is that age isn’t a valid way to ID ones knowledge of internet functionality.

Even as a mere correlation it’s pretty weak. It’s arbitrary, uninformative, and rather often wrong when applied to this particular metric. 

TBH, I’m shocked we’re even still talking about it in context of this thread. 

[Ten oz]

29 minutes ago, iNow said:

The point is that age isn’t a valid way to ID ones knowledge of internet functionality.

Even as a mere correlation it’s pretty weak. It’s arbitrary, uninformative, and rather often wrong when applied to this particular metric. 

TBH, I’m shocked we’re even still talking about it in context of this thread. 

You are right that every person of a particular age to a person can't be lumped together but I think you are overstating the point. There is a lot of correlation between age and the way political news is consumed and understood. When we look at the way Cambridge Analytica focused fake news age was key factor along with gender, race, geographic location, and etc. Foxnews, drudge report, breitbart, info wars, and etc market themselves towards audiences based things like age. There is an average age for every audience. Tv and radio ratings are broken down by age groups. 

Millennials (born 81'-96) are 60% Democrat to just 30% Republican. Gen X (65'-80' my generation') is closer to 50/50, and it moves to right from their through baby boomer and the silent generation. Trump's base isn't young. When Trump attacks Google he isn't speaking to young people. Trumps claim against Google came from a headline ran by the Drudge Report here . Trump and Alex Jones are speaking to a specific audience when they attack the internet as politically bias. That targeted audience isn't a young one. 

[MigL]

Yeah, what he said...

Some of us were building our own computers in the late 70/early 80s ( Sinclair was my first, then CP/M ), and were on BBS in the 80s ( at 300 baud ).

And, don't tell anyone, but I'm now 59.

Edited September 1, 2018 by MigL

[Ten oz]

1 hour ago, MigL said:

Yeah, what he said...

Some of us were building our own computers in the late 70/early 80s ( Sinclair was my first, then CP/M ), and were on BBS in the 80s ( at 300 baud ).

And, don't tell anyone, but I'm now 59.

Understanding of how computers work has no barring on the way one perceives information online. Considering the amount of apps young people use today and the fact most were never directly exposed to DOS or Linux I would imagine someone like yourself knows much more about programming than them.

Would you agree that younger people are far less interested in politics overall and that far less of what young people do online involves political related media?

[MigL]

Agree.
My nephews and niece hardly ever watch the news, or care about politics.
That is part of the push to get younger people to vote; a lot of policy directly affects them, but they don't care enough to make their voices heard through the democratic process.
They are the ones who get sent to places like Afghanistan; surely they have a right to voice an opinion, and influence the decisions, about sending them there.

[John Cuthber]

12 hours ago, Ten oz said:

I went with 45 because the internet wasn't publicly accessable till 94'

That's a matter of definition
People were using JANET 10 years earlier.

It hardly matters. 
I didn't "grow up using the internet" but I use it a lot now, and have a pretty good understanding of it.

It's like saying that my 85 year old dad can't understand television because it didn't exist when (and where) he was growing up.
It's obviously nonsense.

[Ten oz]

30 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

That's a matter of definition
People were using JANET 10 years earlier.

It hardly matters. 
I didn't "grow up using the internet" but I use it a lot now, and have a pretty good understanding of it.

It's like saying that my 85 year old dad can't understand television because it didn't exist when (and where) he was growing up.
It's obviously nonsense.

It is certainly fair to say I did a poor job expressing my point. Especially as it zig zag'd around being an on and off since.  Younger people are less interested in political news and political news accounts for a lower portion of what they use the internet for compared to older people. I also think younger people do not think about news in terms of political balance, equal time, or needing to show both sides of the U.S.'s two party system. Those are ideas pushed by network and cable news. The median audience for cable news, for example, is over 60yrs old. What Alex Jones and Trump are pushing regarding fairness are concepts which exist to tv news audiences (old people). So in my opinion the issue of political bias via the internet is one that primarily only exists/matters to older people as they, we, are the ones who think about news in those terms. 

 

[John Cuthber]

3 minutes ago, Ten oz said:

Younger people are less interested in political news

As far as I'm aware, they always were,

[Ten oz]

12 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

As far as I'm aware, they always were,

Of course

[iNow]

48 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

As far as I'm aware, they always were,

*cough. *we. *cough