Liberal Internet? - Page 11

On July 06 2010 06:15 yeti wrote:
If we assume that the internet encompasses all people and their opinions, then by default the internet can only be neutral, since true neutrality would be the mean (average) liberal/conservative opinions.


Fig. 1

If we assume that the internet continues to incorporate every person, then every data point is represented underneath the curve. Then all opinions average out to neutrality.

Two points:
1ST:
You—since you do not know the opinions of everyone—can not take the mean of opinions and therefore not know what true left/right neutrality is. Likely you base you mean neutrality gauge on your experience with yourself and others. Likely you view yourself as having neutral-bias since you have based you opinions of neutrally off:
a. Your own opinions, which stand formost in your understanding of the world
b. Your family's opinions which likely shaped your political philosophies.
c. Your friend's opinions. You likely choose your friends through compatible ideologies, or because they were a by-product of a similar environment.
Since your pool of data (sample) which you determine neutrality is not representative of the population


Fig. 2

Your definition of neutrality is bias. The internet—since it incorporates a much larger sample (or possibility the entire population)—would actually be a more accurate gauge of neutrality.


2ND:
I agree with you that strong liberal/conservative opinions seem to be over-represented. Since the internet is voluntary response, it means only people who are highly invested in politics—and therefore high chance of being partisan—are making comments on political threads.

However, your conclusion of liberal bias is due to an availability bias.
If I assume you are a conservative (since you are complaining about liberals) then all liberal opinions tend to stick out because:
a. more of the opinions appear liberal since more of them actually are "liberal" according too your own sense of bias neutrality (see Fig 3).


Fig. 3

b. The outliers to the left appear even further away from your neutrality. Conservative outliers appear less outlandish since they are closer to you (even if you can recognize them as being Conservative) Since the strong liberals tend to stand out as being more strongly bias you tend to remember them more. This is an Availability Heuristic because you can recall them better (since they were more extreme).



The internet since it embodies, possibly the largest sample size imaginable, is perhaps the least bias media in the world. Now since some people dont use the internet (i.e. My grandparents who are conservative) and some people weigh in more (cooperations with money, political activists) their would be a conceivable bias. But like I said, the sample is as close to the population as imaginable. Cooperations actually have an equal say on a forum as a human, because it is free for everyone (money does not apply) something I can not say about television media.

The internet since it incorporates so many people and because this sample of views originates from the population of the world, all points in the internet curve must exist under the population curve. [note: when I drew your opinion curve some points existed outside out the population curve this was intended for illustrative purposes as your curve was two small to see otherwise]


Fig. 4

The internet—containing so much of the population's opinions—exhibits a local neutrality almost identical to the global neutrality, since the size of the sample and population are very similar. What I mean by local neutrality is the neutrality exhibited within that group sample. The larger the sample size the more likely the sample is representative of the population, and the local neutrality becomes a more valid indicator of global neutrality. Since the internet is one of the largest possible samples, it is the most accurate indicator of the true population's neutrality.



Lets take at a smaller sample. FoxNews which I represented by the right green curve in Fig. 4 is "Fair and Balanced"™ in a local sense, since all of its ~1000 contributors contribute their views to form the sample's neutrality. However, the sample of reporters is not random. Fox attracts conservative reporters and opinions since most of their viewers are conservative. Fox's corespondents likely base their political ideology off of available sources (i.e. Their conservative Co-workers). Fox's viewers likely base their own neutrality gauges off of Fox, who tries to give their viewer the conservative opinions they demand (thus feeding off of each other.) The feed-back of viewers and the network/corespondents furthers the idea of political bias, since people get a larger (tho equally bias) sample to base their neutrality gauge on.
This creates a divide between the various news networks and viewers, which decreases the communication (the access of conservatives to moderate-liberal arguments) and prevents people from Balancing their neutrality gauge with opposing opinions.
The same could be said about MSMBC and Liberals (Fig. 4 left green curve).
An advantage of the internet, is that there is only One. All opinions are given equal status, and the sheer number of participants and speed of information ensures the people are less likely to close off themselves from opposing opinions. On the internet 1 Billion get to base their neutrality off of each other instead of just 1000 agreeable network contributors.
However segmentation of the internet into sites, does restrict complete free access. Idealogical clicks still form within forums, and certain forums (@OP perhaps the ones you visited) will invariably contain a local bias due to a smaller sample. A great example of this would be a really conservative forum run by Fox, which only FoxConservatives would post on. Because of the belief that this Fox run Forum was indifferently conservative, mild liberals would probably stay away. The occasional Ultra-Liberal, however, would make a outrageous post to intentionally upset the status quo. *This would cause an availability-bias since the Conservatives posters would remember the Crazy-Liberals post, because it upset their "neutral" discussion, while the moderate-liberal didn't actually balence to the forum's local neutrality curve.*
Within this segmentation, there is bias in the internet. However, since the internet contains thousands of forums, which are posted by the largest sample of the population, it all averages out to be very neutral media. Just as the TV news media averages out to be more neutral than the individual networks.

Originally, the Center Green curve in Fig 4. was supposed to be CNN. I guess it still could be...
but I rather repurpose it.

Now imagine the center curve is a random sample, such as the Gallup Poll. Unlike news network corespondents they were chosen randomly from the population. Because of random selection, the Poll's neutrality gauge is representative of the actual population. However, note that polls never actually contain the whole population. Samples are only samples of the population. A Gallup Poll sample size—though accurate to ±4%—pales in size when compared to the internet. Problems with polls is that they often can have misleading questions which can represent bias of the organization giving the poll. For instance:
Poll 1: In light of Obama recent mishandling of the horrifying Gulf Oil Disaster, do you approve of him? y/n
Poll 2: Do you approve of Obama's handling of the recent Gulf Oil Spill? y/n
Poll 3: Considering Obama's successful halt of job loss, is the Oil Spill a important concern? y/n
Obviously, 2 of these imaginary polls contain bias. An other issue polls are only targeted to single issues, whereas the internet can contain everyone's opinions, from "24" cancellation to Israel. To my knowledge, Gallup has never issued asked:

but the internet has.
The biggest problem with the internet is that it is so huge, it is almost impossible to quantify. Because it represents a more of the population it should be assumed as more neutral representing, but it is impossible for me or the OP to know its true bias.

@OP It is likely that more of the world appears liberal to you, but remember only half of the world can be liberal and half conservative. If some people change their mind (lets say everyone suddenly agrees abortion is bad) then the mean opinion would shift with this change. Abortion would cease being a liberal/conservative specifier—since no one would disagree with the issue—and the mean (neutral) opinion would therefore be anti-abortion. It is likely that you have a conservative outlook. You have based your sense of neutrality on that conservative outlook, and therefor more of the world would appear as liberal (Fig 3). But, we don't actually know the global neutrality. If we collected everyone and linearized their philosophies into Conservative/Liberal, you could turn out to be Left of the mean (as illustrated in Fig 5)



Fig 5. Since we don't know the actual global neutrality due to limited sample, you could hypothetically be liberal.

Until then, it is ok to call networks liberal/conservative or web sites as left/rightist. But the internet as a whole, considering it is possibly the largest sample of opinions ever, is as close to global mean as possible.


Final Note:
@OP: You may consider yourself as neutral (or maybe even slightly liberal) I assumed you were a conservative, but my graphs and examples should still apply if you can admit to even the slightest bias on your local opinions as opposed to the global mean, regardless of directionality (left/right).

Please don't flame me for being a liberal. I recently changed from conservative to liberal (if you want to call it that since I lack most morality) If this thread was called "Conservative Internet" I would be saying the same things (tho my graphs would be reversed). Also, don't take offense at the attack of FoxNews, I used it b/c i figured you were a conservative. I watch FoxNews and MSMBC each 30% of the time and CNN 40%. I meant it when I said, "The same [about Fox] could be said about MSMBC," it should.

gg

Edit: Wow I didn't realize how long this took me. So many post between me and the OP. I hope I didn't break up any discussion.