As opposed to Reddit where every subreddit aside from those dedicated to alt-right topics has a left-leaning tinge. Every platform has biases. It's just that Reddit chose to ban a specific group, so it's logical that group alone would dominate alternatives.
Reddit banned demonstrably fabricated extremist content. It just so happens the political party most associated with it continued to eat it up.
/r/conservative is a gated community only for people they agree with. Reddit perfectly allows them to exist in their own created hypocritical bubble, along with lots of other subreddits.
There's a lot of subreddits that should be zero politics, where people are being banned because they're members of other subreddits, or they aren't even members, but posted in those other subreddits.
You can find about a post a week in /r/WatchRedditDie of someone who posted an anti-Trump response to another person in a Donald Trump-friendly subreddit and they end up banned from other subreddits like /r/OffMyChest... for the crime of disagreeing with a Trump supporter, in a Trump subreddit. The very act of even associating, even in an antagonistic way, with a Trump supporter is ban worthy?
Every moderator whose ever done that should be immediately stripped of all power and banned at the IP level.
If Reddit admins weren't absolute cowards now, they would do it, but the site is sufficiently corporatized now.
I'm not entirely sure I understand this point. Even if I were to concede the point that all of Reddit has a left-leaning (in a US sense of the word) tinge, is that at all comparable to the right-leaning tinge of Voat?
Is advocating for e.g. defunding the police, medicare for all, and free college comparable to saying immigrants should be shot on the border, that the holocaust simultaneously didn't happen and wasn't effective enough, and that racial minorities should be hanged?
Even if you vehemently disagree with the three examples of left-leaning policies I used as an example, and any other examples I could've used, surely you can recognize that they are fundamentally different to the stuff that permeated every crevice of Voat? Saying Reddit and Voat both have a tinge completely ignores any context and nuance.
EDIT:
There's an example I'd like to bring. It's from a thread on the frontpage called "Voat, I could use a little life advice". It's from a person that is having trouble paying their bills, and can't do much doordash driving because they refuse to wear a mask. The most upvoted response is this:
> "Was a really good programmer for years". Good, not many people are and it's a skill that's good for decades. n* * * * * * can't fake coding skills like they do everything else
Another upvoted response from the thread says this:
> Why don’t we create funds for fellow nationalists like the n* * * * * * and the ki* * *? Somewhere to pool resources to lift white brothers in need.
Mind you, this is from the front page of both the AskReddit-equivalent and the global front page. And this is on a question that wasn't about anyone but the original poster and their money trouble.
I think it's very problematic to conflate "right wing" with "racist". There's nothing inherently right or left wing about being racist, and I suspect you'd find many racists who support government healthcare and strong social safety nets.
Society has a left-leaning tinge. Especially society in the age range that reddit caters to. There's no grand conspiracy. Right politics are wildly unpopular with young to middle-age people.
I can't respond to AntiImperialis2 directly anymore, so I'll leave this here...
I don't think that because Boomers and (a lot of ?)GenX tended to grow more conservative as they got older proves it's 'the natural order'.. Millennials are approaching 40 now and the liberal ones I know are still very liberal..
I'd argue that Truman getting elected in 1948 meant that there were a lot 'progressive' older folks back then. Especially since there was a more conservative "Dixiecrat" on the ballot as well.
So growing old and becoming conservative may not necessarily go hand in hand...
People don't get more conservative as they get older, they get more conservative when they have more to lose. It just so happens that as people get older they tend to get houses, families, long-term careers, etc, which tilts them towards preserving the status quo in amber so as not to threaten what they have.
And if, hypothetically, a generation were to grow up and find themselves unable to afford a home of their own, unable to afford a family, and unable to land a career, they will find themselves with very little to lose and very little incentive to preserve the status quo, regardless of their age.
People get more conservative as they get older because they realize things cost money, how hard they have to work to earn it, and how bad the government is at spending it for them. I'd say modern day conservativism is more akin to individualism - don't let others spend money for you because you spend your money more wisely, and if you don't it's your fault. I think you'll find most young people don't even make the correlation that everything governments spend costs money and that money comes from their own pockets. They usually consider the government to have infinite money and have barely stopped being taken care of by their parents or still are. You even see cities like Detroit going bankrupt because, no, governments don't have infinite money. You do have to pick and choose what to spend it on and you can't get everything that just sounds nice.
Let me put it this way. Young people see their elders espouse these views. They associate conservative ideas with being patronizing. This actively pushes them away from conservative ideology. This occurs whether or not the views themselves are correct. Change people's minds by being less patronizing not more.
Modern conservatives loves to spend taxpayer money right up until they are out of office. Not a peep about the budget deficits the past 4 years, but now suddenly it matters again.
The “people get more conservative as they get older” idea is somewhat of a myth. My family and family friends who were free love hippies in the 1960s and 1970s are Trump haters on Facebook today.
To give some more solid data than people in my circle of friends: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidentia... This is the demographics for the 1984 election, the one where Reagan wiped Mondale out. Among 18-24 year voters, 39% voted for Mondale (liberal/D); 61% voted for Reagan (conservative/R).
Now, let’s fast forward to 2004, which is the first election where young people were more liberal than older generations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidentia... Here, among 19-29 year old voters, it was 54% Kerry (D), 45% Bush (R). It was also the last election where a Republican won the national popular vote.
All that shows to me is youth is liberal, which no one was denying? I'd be happy for enough for the general population to be more liberal leaning, but I can't say I'm seeing evidence of it outside of urban areas ?
The youth in the 1984 Reagan-Mondale election was not liberal (nor were they liberal in 1988, nor that much liberal than voters in general in 1992, etc.), so youth being liberal is not a function of one’s age as much as it’s a function of the generation one has been born in to.
first you talk about "our youth and our society are a good deal more liberal than they were 15 or 25 years ago.". Which you show as having gone from 54% D to 65% D ?? Which I would guess is fairly liberal. Then you go back roughly 40 years to say "The youth in the 1984 Reagan-Mondale election was not liberal".
And the generational thing is what I brought up originally. Boomers and some GenX don't necessarily 'point the way' that every generation will age.
I think the primary factor is that the society itself becomes more progressive, so definitions of "progressive/conservative" change. Sixty years ago, segregated schools were supported by mainstream conservatives, and same-sex marriage would have been considered a radical leftist agenda. An "ordinary" young person from 1960s, growing old without changing their opinions, would seem hopelessly out of touch today.
I would have assumed that as well, but it seems a lot of 'social norms' I thought had changed, really haven't..from racism, to sexism, to hate crimes..It really seems we've evolved very little from 100 years ago.
That's true. Younger people seem to lean left. As they grow older, a lot of them start to lean conservative.
My hypothesis is that when they are young and underdeveloped, they have incomplete understanding of the world, are prone to believing in unrealistic utopian ideas, and hence are easy to manipulate. No wonder, the leftists want the voting age to be lowered even further.
As they grow older and wiser, they see it for what it is.
The younger conservatives are explained by the fact that some kids who grow up in conservative households don't fall for the same manipulation and older liberals are explained by the fact that some people are more reluctant to change, mostly because they weave their personalities around their identities in early adulthood. Some is of course explained by influence of peers (i.e. people adopt a political view to fit in) and hence location... but I think this covers it all.
I know I will get downvoted for this which is fine but I'd like to know your hypothesis for the same population leaning conservative as they age is... if it's not too much trouble.
I don't see this. There is right-wing content hitting front-page reddit constantly, and a lot of the most popular sub-reddits like "change my view" are just soap-boxes for right-wing talking points.
>I don't see this. There is right-wing content hitting front-page reddit constantly
front page as in "/r/all", or your front page? At least on /r/all there isn't much "right wing content", aside from some posts from /r/greentext and /r/PoliticalCompassMemes.
> As of right now all the posts on /r/all not right leaning.
That's a pretty funny way to say "all but one or two posts out of 25 are not related to politics at all". Unless you consider things like wearing masks political.
>That's a pretty funny way to say "all but one or two posts out of 25 are not related to politics at all".
That's not wrong, but it also has nothing to do with my previous comments, which were only talking political lean, not the presence/absence of politics.
