I know you didn’t see this one coming.
It goes against everything we have come to know.
It is shocking. (h/t @joshjonsmith)
Study: Liberals More Likely To Block Online Friends Over Political Disagreements
People with liberal views are almost twice as likely as conservatives to unfriend someone on social media over political disagreements, according to a new Pew Research survey.
In every category, people who identified as liberal were more likely to shun their connections over political disagreements….
It’s also called epistemic closure.
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Comments
“It’s also called epistemic closure.”
Yes. Or “intolerance, coupled with fear”. What a crappy way to live!
Oh boy is this true!
It wasn’t long before the loudest and most virulent lefty classmate from high school deleted me as a Facebook friend … at the same time the LA Times’s media critic did (besides being high school classmates, they were roomates at Berkeley).
I just recently gave up on Facebook. The lefties are just too much. They post so much sanctimonious political crap.
I posted a little jokey comment one time, very lighthearted, which referenced cash for clunkers on one girl’s post. She then posted a comment following mine asking me not to get political.
Of course, she posts pro-Obama political stuff every day!!
It finally just got to be too crazy. They can’t take a joke. You can’t kid around with them without things getting heated and them deleting you.
Lately, every time I had a few drinks with dinner I had the overwhelming urge to go on Facebook and just “take the piss” out of all of them.
Then I realized … I’d be sinking to their level and acting as if I were in high school again … so, I deactivated my account.
Oh, well. Maybe I’ll try again in five or 10 years and see if they grew up a little.
I came here to post pretty much your remarks word for word.
My friends are all in theatre, so it’s lefty, left, left, left all day long. Facebook posts about gay this and gay that, Bush hatred, Palin hatred, Limbaugh hatred, Police hatred, just plain generic hatred…
One woman I know posted something positive about Jesus and she lost a whole pile of “friends” in a sudden flash.
Yep RKae,
The constant piling on Palin got to be really boring after a while.
The LA Times’s media critic is a joke of a human being. He would post all his lefty tweets on FB to his few thousand followers. I’d be the lone conservative arguing, politely, (you know, adding a tiny sliver of intellectual diversity), and right away they’d start calling me names … “racist,” “homophobe,” etc.
So what did he do? He deleted me! Haha!
I just checked his twitter account. Lots of anti-Rush tweets about the Fluke affair, a few anti-Hannity tweets mocking his playing the Bell video, and a couple of anti-Fox tweets.
Not one single tweet about CNN and Pollak’s KO of O’Brien and O’Brien’s subsequent pathetic attempt at damage control.
That’s a major newspaper’s even-handed media critic for you.
Carol Kane:”Humperdinck!
Humperdinck! Humperdinck! Humperdinck”
Billy Crystal: “La la la, nobody’s hearing nuthin’!”
CK: “Humperdinck!”
They fight like girls?
This is how girls fight: they ostracize one another regularly. Its something boys simply do not do.
Well… Some bois do…
http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2012/03/12/carney-newt-gingrich-lying-250-gas/
How long before the “tolerant” left starts a campaign against the Pew Research people for exposing the truth? 🙂
I’m looking for investors to back my new social media product.
It’s called:
LeftBook.
Let’s call it LeftOutBook!
I like it, Joan!
Show me $100,000 and I’ll take it under active consideration!! 🙂
Liberals place a great deal of importance on consensus. It’s not enough for them to win — they want everyone to agree with them too. That’s why they keep talking about a supposed scientific consensus on global warming. From their standpoint, that’s important.
Study: Liberals More Likely To Block Online Friends Over Political Disagreements
This suggests a hypothesis that leftist bloggers are more likely to ban discordant commenters than rightist bloggers are. A related question is whether conservatives or liberals on a community board, when in the majority, are more likely to mob or bully the minority.
The ideology of tolerance is tolerant as long as you speak their politically correct language and you think exactly like them. Otherwise, you’re a sexist, racist, homophobe, extremist. And those are the nice things they say about you.
BAN.
Since thinking is hard, and debating the merits of..er…anything…is even harder…
I suspect the calls for this study by Pew to be banned have already started.
This speaks to a concept I developed elsewhere. Bear with me please:
I refer to the “Left” as either the Enemy, or as TWANLOC. Those Who Are No Longer Our Countrymen. There is a separation. It is getting worse [have any of us here not had a friend who was Leftist become an enemy over politics/culture?], and will probably have important effects on our concept of political legitimacy in the near future.
Subotai Bahadur
My favorite is a neighbor who first proudly stated that she refused to listen to Fox and got all her news from Morning Joe. Then she accused me of being ill informed and anti science because I don’t believe in global warming.
I informed this high school graduate with delusions of intellectual grandeur that I didn’t believe in anthropogenic global warming- a term I had to explain to her. I was too Christian to add that I had once been a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow and had forgotten a great deal more than would ever begin to know about the limitations of computer modeling
Studies like the above are anything but shocking to most conservatives, particularly former lefties such as myself. I’ve always tried to welcome civil discussion about the taboos of politics and religion and have always attempted to listen and really consider opposing viewpoints. Have I always succeeded in doing so? Certainly not. But I recognize the importance of intelligent debate and exposing one’s belief system to challenges in the “marketplace of ideas”. Indeed, doing so is a key component of an open, liberal society.
It is also one of a plethora of examples of where our friends on the left often fail to live up to (or even try to live up to) their ideals. So many of them sanctimoniously boast of their open-mindedness, critical thinking, anti-dogmatic analysis, to say nothing of their devotion to tolerance. In practice, many (though certainly not all) of them have a very narrow sphere of what is “acceptable” in the realm of socio-economic political discourse. This sphere usually includes all viewpoints left of center (from traditional Marxism-Leninism through social democracy, welfare liberalsim and even *sometimes* the mostly defunct ‘blue dog’ Democrats). It might include some libertarian trends too, particularly those which emphasize cultural issues and foreign policy isolationism over free market economics. It also often includes a very small number of “House Conservatives”, such as David Brooks and David Frum. But that’s it. They are open-minded to and tolerant of anything within this sphere. Outside of it??? Come on! That’s like asking them to be tolerant and open-minded of neo-Nazism. (Indeed, sometimes they’ll make such an analogy outright).
I mention this, not merely as a frustrated conservative who is utterly disgusted by the hypocrisy of more than a few progressives (though I admit to being so). I also speak as a former lefty who, at the time, was often disturbed, confused and a bit frustrated by fellow lefties for such behavior. I well remember how my circle of friends in college and beyond (all of whom were either left-wing or apolitical) would react whenever a conservative was among us and voiced her opinion: Usually, they’d just ignore her, then attack her mercilessly behind her back. They were so comfortable reinforcing each others opinions and so uncomfortable whenever those opinions were challenged (even very tepidly).
In addition, they were often uncomfortable, if not downright hostile, when one of their own deviated from the party line on a given issue. For instance, back in the 1990’s I supported welfare reform. Also, long before my full-blown gestalt shift to the right, I came to support school choice. Lastly, I was always at least a little hesitant about the dire predictions of the AGW movement. Though I espoused orthodox progressive beliefs on virtually every other issue of relevance, I remember being rather stunned with the level of antipathy my few deviations sparked.
Of course, there are plenty of conservatives who are narrow-minded and unwilling to subject their worldview to any sort of challenge. But, in my experience, conservatives tend to be much more comfortable with their beliefs, much less defensive, much less obsessed with trying to ensuring they are surrounded only by fellow travelers. Honest and open discussion and debate may not always be welcome (there is life beyond politics), but conservatives tend not to shut out challenging viewpoints entirely.
Shoot, even my conservative facebook friends block me. Sniff, sniff.
It’s called the Pol Pot theory of progressive tolerance.
Liberals More Likely To Block Online Friends Over Political Disagreements
Shirley Not. I mean THEY are open minded, right?<oh-oh, thatsa' bad word..
[…] Built-In Capacity for Lefty Willful Ignorance Posted on March 13, 2012 9:30 am by Bill Quick » Shocking headline of the day – Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion It is shocking. Study: Liberals More Likely To Block Online Friends Over Political […]
I guess after three+ years of Obama managing nothing more more than a catastrophic failure, some of them have come to realize that Obama is a catastrophic failure. They just can’t stand someone telling them that Obama is a catastrophic failure.
Oh boy, I love this. I’m the biggest conservative presence on facebook for a LOT of Obama supporters who live in DC. However, I don’t think anyone has blocked me. I know there are people who like me less…but that’s okay, Obama is too dangerous and these people so desperately want to be part of La Nomenklatura. God has another thing coming for Obama and his supporters, IMHO.
No way I invented epistemic closure on facebook. I delete everyone who annoys me, even family members. I actually prefer to be deleted by people who don’t like me. I really don’t want to be friends with the whole world. It is blissful but boring. It also prevents me from FB addiction.
I even got some have a nice life hate messages after I quietly deleted a couple of annoying OWSers. I love having the ability to delete people from my life.
I like understanding who they think. The few OWSers I know are from wealthy families, so they’re quite fun to laugh at.
Let’s not sell the progressives short-
It’s hardly limited to Facebook or blogs-
Any conservative that (used to) comment on their local newspaper website taken over by Gannet knows all to well.
Surely you can’t be serious.
Yes, I can.
And, don’t call my Shirley.
Agreed, the Left has no monopoly on Group Think Orthodoxy. Just try advocating from the Right for a guest worker program and more decent treatment of illegals brought here as children, or illegals with children born here. Powerline quietly de-friends contrarians; JWF prefers ad hominem. LI has been gracious — which I credit to Prof. Jacobson’s admirable integrity.
FYI, this is supposed to be a reply to Jim | March 13, 2012 at 12:16 pm.
Liberals can’t handle/tolerate people who disagree. But then again, aren’t they supposed to be the chosen people of tolerance?
I find many liberals just want to live in Liberalland, where everyone is cool and no one has to think about the consequences of their ideological yearnings. Conservatives ruin it all. We deny them their utopian fantasies; we deny them their heaven.
If I could give your post multiple “likes”, I would. You’ve summed it up nicely. I would add, however, that many liberals DO live in Liberalland, have worked hard to get there and stay there and are quite upset when any mean old conservative crashes their little tea party (pun intended! ;-)).
Senator (now Governor) Brownback touched on this issue during his brief Presidential campaign in 2008: It is much easier (and more common) to have lived one’s entire life in a liberal bubble than in a conservative bubble; much more common to rarely if ever have been exposed to conservatives and conservatism in itself (not a lefty parody therein) than to have avoided any exposure to the left. In comparison:
To have lived one’s life in a liberal bubble one would have to have been raised by liberal parents, in a lefty enclave, typically a college town (Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor, etc.) or a trendy area of most major cities, particularly in blue states. One could have gone to public schools and almost any state university, particularly any flagship university. One could then be in a multitude of professions: teaching (K-12 or university), library science, law, nursing, etc…all of which tend to be dominated by liberals. One could expose onself to much of the MSM, anything in the entertainment industy (outside of country music…sometimes) and be a member of most “mainline Protestant” religious denominations, reform Judaism and even certain Catholic parishes for that matter. In other words, it would require some effort to maintain the bubble…but not that much.
How about the reverse? For a functioning adult to maintain herself in a conservative bubble, she would have to have been raised by conservative parents, probably in a rural or small town environment, preferably in a deep red state. She almost certainly would have to have attended private (likely religious) schools or have been home-schooled. If she went to college, it would have been a conservative Christian college. As for a profession: a military career, law enforcement, engineering (to some extent), and certain jobs in business…or blue/pink collar work (that’s non-union). She would need to consistently avoid most of the MSM, avoid most of the entertainment industry and stick with an evangelical Protestant, orthodox Judiaism or traditionalist Catholic religion. This is possible, of course. But it would be much more of a challenge.
Bottom line: Liberalland exists, many (though surely not all) liberals enjoy living there and work tirelessly to maintain it.
P.S. The liberal bubble described above matches closely most of my life until my early 20’s. And yet, I managed to “evolve”. So, it is possible! 😉
I just use my fb account to post stuff from my forums.
never even look to see if any replies or anything.
screw em, its only a tool to use.
gotta redo the fb app anyways to make it fully seperate from forum account sometime…if I ever care enough about FB to do it I may get to it.
I’m generally anti-fb because it reduces everyone to his lowest common denominator.
We were on fb for about 3 weeks. The highlight was to get dh’s former singer to remove her political post in embarrassment. We waited for her to post something overtly political, which happened to be a NYT editorial (Krugman, maybe?). Dh span her dome using terms like Lauffer curve. Then another friend of ours joined in. The post was gone in an hour. I should have saved the screen print…
Those were the days…
Lenin and Stalin had their purges: if they disagree, kill them.
There are stories of people being murdered because they wanted to leave a Mafia family.
Some of the Islamic hadiths specify the death penalty for apostasy.
Organized crime and their totalitarian brothers love to kill off those who are traitors in thought.
Be happy that the lefties are only doing virtual hits. The future may not be as funny.
They are retreating inside the castle walls and marginalizing themselves in the process. Let them keep their castle while we restore constitutional order to the country.
This may also be a strategic move, in which case beware the archers and other force multipliers.
Been there, had that done to me, don’t need the T-shirt, it’s in black and white (or is that blue and white?) on my Facebook page.
I haven’t talked to my sister in nearly 2 years. She blocked me during a facebook discussion because I was “offending her friends”. In Leftie Land it would seem that all it takes to offend someone is disagreeing with them, and giving statistics and facts to back up your statements.
This is a few weeks after she had come onto my page and gotten into an argument with one of my friends and told them “I don’t know you so I’m inclined to impugn your intelligence”. Of course that wasn’t the least bit mean or offensive on her part, nor was her posting on her wall that I was “delusional” and “mentally unstable”. I’ve been told by my mother that she has no idea to this day why I responded to her block by “unfriending” her, and we don’t speak now.
My father tried to get me talking to her a few months later, so I asked him if he’d expect me to keep up a friendship with a non-relative who had treated me that way. I haven’t heard a peep from him about it since.
I spent years in therapy to learn to not put up with being a doormat; I guess it worked.