Reddit is finding out that if you block everyone not inside your echo chamber, but are still in the smaller echo chamber, every election will shock you
It unfortunately sits on the shoulders of progressives seeking change to convince the conservatives not seeking it to do so. By choosing not to do this asymmetric work, this is the consequence
I'm not a Reddit user (or any social media user unless you count this) but one of my big takeaways from this election is how out-of-touch I am, apparently, with the majority of Americans; I've been shocked for months (years?) that Trump was even still a contender.
I guess I've just been living in heavily blue places, and working alongside highly educated people, since 2016. I thought that everybody could see Trump and Trumpism for what they really are, but I guess not, and I'm left wondering: "Who are these 70M+ people?"
You can be quite highly educated and still sit inside an ideological bubble and have no clue that anything is wrong... until it is.
"Heavily blue" is definitely an ideological bubble, because, as it turns out, and this may shock you (!!!), no political party has a monopoly on truths. There are bad things about Kamala and good things about Trump that you would literally never encounter if you only read "blue media". If you only read blue media, you will also consume a lot of BS (good things that are untrue about Kamala and bad things that are untrue about Trump). Same is true about red media, except with the poles reversed.
And echo chambers just reinforce all this BS.
Intelligent people question the sacred cows, and the most intelligent question the most sacred cows. James Damore was intelligent, wrote an intelligent paper, and instead of engaging with him and his ideas, he got eviscerated. And that was at Google, a supposedly "highly educated" place.
If you just can't say certain things, you are in an oppressive society, or sub-society, end of story.
I got eviscerated on Facebook 2 days ago merely for saying "so I investigated this claim that Trump is fascist, found the attributes of fascism, tried to rate him along those attributes, and he got a C (where F is Fascist)" (for comparison, Kamala got a B somehow, Putin an F, H__ler an F of course). Were there actual counterarguments to it? Nope. Someone asked for evidence, and I cited 3 links with a total of 20+ experts in them who on average said "no, not fascist enough to be labeled it". Then they attacked me for using ChatGPT to help put it all together (genetic fallacy). They kept attacking me and not my analysis. One was a fairly smart individual, but in this case he did not use it.
Since they were mainly attacking ChatGPT at that point, I asked ChatGPT to eviscerate every one of their arguments, defending us both and speaking as itself, which it did, with aplomb, and was amazing.
I didn't necessarily intend to say that it was. I'm just saying that support for Trump has been inversely correlated with education level, so I ended up in a bubble by virtue of working alongside people with advanced degrees (even more so than just living in a blue area). When ~90% of people in one's real life, day-to-day social circle are not Trump supporters it starts to feel like everybody must be of the same opinion, and it's shocking to find out otherwise.
I agree with you about the importance of engaging in independent, critical thought and allowing real discussion.
Facebook users have the opposite problem, where there's unchecked misinformation and self-inflicted echo chambers. Twitter was taken over by a Trump ally and Harris supporters mostly fled, were banned, or had their content shadow banned; it's a white suprematist echo chamber. Fox news, CNN, and sinclair (which owns most local news), and clear channel are all owned by Trump supporters.
Hitler rose via radio, and Trump rose via social media and billionares.
It unfortunately sits on the shoulders of progressives seeking change to convince the conservatives not seeking it to do so. By choosing not to do this asymmetric work, this is the consequence