Social News and Politics
Do social news and politics go together well? Apparently not, as Derek van Vilet writes at the Blog Herald. Fact of the matter is, when you put together a site where everyone can have his say, and a group of people who have some agenda to put forward, then it will get downright dirty.
It’s not because it’s a flaw in the system. It is the nature of the system. And it is within the nature of humans to advance our own causes, even to the extent of playing dirty.
A common misconception: social news sites are the ideal venue for social activism. In fact they are not because they focus on content, not causes. Just ask the 9/11 truth movement how well they’ve done on Netscape. Just like LGF, 9/11 “truthers” (people who do not believe the “official” explanation of the attacks of September 11, 2001) rallied on blogs in an attempt to gain a presence on Netscape. The only problem was that they didn’t care about the quality of the content that they contributed. They were merely interested in discussion of their ideas. So they constantly re-submitted the same content just to keep the discussion going. This would be more appropriate on a forum than a social news site. Or perhaps this kind of activity suggests the need for a whole new type of social activism site.
Ahmed of Techsoapbox says that while news will naturally skew towards the topics that people are interested in, it’s in the discussion threads that the talk gets meaty. The political areas are “about who can troll best.”
The most obvious case of focus groups pushing their agenda is if one reads the comments. As one progresses down the article, you can see that the original comments are all virulently anti-islamic. As you progress down, the entire tone of ‘discussion.’ changes. Users like patriotickiwi and tomcpp continue to fan the flames for as long as they can. The reality of the content was ‘Leader of ex-Muslim group anonymously threatened.’. The sensationalist headline was ‘Group for former Muslims threatened by Muslims’
The main problem with social news is that it’s social. I mean whatever inherent problem that the society has will also rear its ugly head in social news applications, whether it’s religious hatred, racism, politicking, sexual discrimination. Perhaps it will not be in the same forms, but they will be there nonetheless.
Politics can be very dirty. And when you bring in politics to the realm of social news, you get the same mess. There can be no solving this unless you get to solve society’s problems in the first place.
[...] So does the inherent “social”-ness of a system also mean that it is easy to corrupt? I’ve always thought that one of the problems of social media is that it’s social. So whatever problems society has would also reflect in social media, such as social news sites. In real life, friends have preferences and collude (a.k.a. “cooperate” or “conspire”) to achieve whatever goals they have. Same with social news. Friends can work together to arrive at their own headlines. [...]
The DIGG “Friends” System: Does It Work? » Jack Of All Blogs said this on March 4, 2007 11:01 pm