The social echo chamber and the liberal inquisition

A new study shows that leftists are three times more likely than conservatives to block a “friend” from their social media networks because of their political leanings.

The results of the study aren’t from the sort of heated political social media battles that tend to go down on social media platforms during election cycles, when argument over politicians and their platforms can become heated, where one might expect to see this sort of behaviour. No, the outcome of this study actually provides its findings from a post election environment, where the issue isn’t entirely a matter of one’s perspective towards a particular candidate.

Furthermore, the study revealed that it is actually leftist women, aka feminists, who are the most likely to engage in social media blocking in order to shield themselves against opposing political opinions. Of course, this doesn’t really come as a surprise based on numerous cases that have been reported in the headlines of feminists and their amazing degree of hostile intolerance. The study reports:

This year’s bitter presidential election has caused a rift in online relationships. According to a new survey, 13% of Americans reported blocking or unfriending a “friend” on social media because of their political postings

But the results of the study, carried out by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute, show the impulse to block varies widely based on gender and political leanings.

The study shows Democrats were almost three times more likely than Republicans (24% vs. 9%) to have unfriended someone after the election. A similar disparity turned up for self-identified liberals versus conservatives (28% vs. 8%). Meanwhile, only 9% of independents reportedly booted someone out of their online social circles because of politics.

As this graphic shows, the survey also identified “Democratic women” as the most likely of all groups to block someone on social media:

The survey did not ask questions about cutting online ties to others on specific websites such as Facebook or Twitter. The results show 4% of respondents said they did not belong to any social network.

There are a number of possible explanations for the different rates at which various groups unfriended others over politics.

One is that Democrats may be feeling despondent about the election, and are thus more inclined to block stories about Donald Trump or victorious conservatives. Another is that liberals and women may be more frequent targets of online trolls, leading them to block more often.

Whatever the reason, the overall results do point to a larger and troubling trend in online media: The growth of “filter bubbles” in which people live in ideological cocoons that shut out discordant viewpoints. Some fear the existence of filter bubbles increase political partisanship as voters become less exposed to those who don’t share their opinions.

The study, which also included question about Christmas and family politics, was conducted by surveying 1,004 people by phone.

While the Left loves to pride itself on what it perceives as its superior level of tolerance, as opposed to the supposedly “intolerant”, amidst a nearly endless list of derogatory terms, Right, the Left loves to go all ad hominem against those who hold to political opinions which variate from their own. Ed Brodow recently observed:

The policy of the Left is to vilify anyone who disagrees with its ideology. Conservatives, by and large, don’t behave like that. As Ben Shapiro says in Bullies, conservatives are “generally civil people.”

In 1996, Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole with 49 percent of the popular vote and 379 electoral votes. If you supported Dole, Clinton backers would still talk to you. Not anymore. The simple fact that you are conservative is enough to turn your liberal friends and family against you. It all began with Obama. In 2007, when many acquaintances learned that I was not voting for their hero, they called me a racist. They didn’t care about my reasons. To them, no reason was good enough to justify my decision. One of my closest friends told me that I was stupid and has never talked to me again. For the past several months, my Facebook feed has been crawling with nasty, abusive statements charging that all Trump supporters are racists.

What accounts for this intolerant behavior by liberals? Throughout history, some human beings have used their religious beliefs to brutalize non-believers. This approach has wormed its way into the liberal playbook. Progressive liberals behave as though their ideology has been handed down from the mountaintop. Progressivism has morphed into our newest religion. With frightening similarities to Islam, the religion of the Left “is an authoritarian movement that wants total compliance with its dictates,” says Daniel Greenfield, Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, “with severe punishments for those who disobey.”

No longer regarded as merely political contests, elections represent to the Left a duel between good and evil. “Conservatives think liberals are stupid,” said author Charles Krauthammer. “Liberals think conservatives are evil.” You can tolerate stupidity but you can’t countenance evil. “You have to understand progressivism as a kind of religion—specifically a fundamentalist religion,” argues The Federalist. “In this view of the world, evil takes the form of any barrier to your self-expression.” Liberals believe that free speech should not apply to anything they disagree with. “People who violate the progressive code,” writes Mark Levin in Liberty and Tyranny, “are socially ostracized, sued for discrimination, forced to resign, and driven out of business.”

The typical liberal doesn’t give a damn about your individual rights or opinions. He only cares about his own point-of-view, which he, uncritically, deems to be superior. Today’s liberal will go on at length about “social justice” and the “common good,” but his bottom line is a society that conforms to his ideological aims and his alone. When a belief system is enshrined in a religion, it cannot tolerate criticism.

Leftists not only like to hole themselves up in a cocoon in order to protect themselves from the “hate speech” of differing opinions, they want to extinguish them, because by being different from those perspectives that the Left espouses, it is, by definition, intolerant and hateful. Hence, in Youtube’s bid to fight hate speech and other forms of banned expressions, it hired the SPLC to help define and combat these evils, which, it turns out, was opinions that don’t coincide with the SPLC’s Leftist agenda.

The intolerant attitude of the Left even extends to those who would otherwise side with them on numerous other issues, as identity politics are increasingly utilized as the means by which Leftist orthodoxy is gauged, as even those Democrats who disagree on one or more areas are branded heretics and expelled from the Leftist fold on the basis of their ideological heterodoxy. The case of  Rep Dan Lipinski partially illustrates this:

Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski (Ill.) said that “Democrats have chased people out of the party” in response to an aggressive and progressive primary challenge due to his pro-life stance and other conservative-leaning positions.

Lipinski is being targeted by liberals who are frustrated with his opposition to abortion and that he is one of three Democrats still in office who voted against the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

A recent Gallup survey, paired with a survey from Yale, demonstrated:

Last October, for example, Yale’s William F. Buckley Jr. program released the results of a survey of 800 college students that showed 83 percent believed the First Amendment should be “followed and respected.” A whopping 93 percent said there was value in listening to “views and opinions that I may disagree with.”

Good news, right? Not so fast. It turns out that 58 percent of students said colleges should “forbid” speakers “who have a history of engaging in hate speech,” with hate speech defined as “anything one particular person believes is harmful, racist, or bigoted.” Oh, and almost 40 percent believed it was sometimes acceptable to shout down or disrupt a speaker.

On Sunday, Gallup and the Knight Foundation released the results of a new survey of 3,014 college students. On the one hand, its results were sadly familiar. An overwhelming majority (89 percent) said it was “extremely” or “very” important to protect citizens’ free-speech rights, but a full 64 percent said the First Amendment shouldn’t protect so-called hate speech. A strong majority (60 percent) supported restricting even costumes that “stereotype certain racial or ethnic groups.” Almost half of students supported establishing speech codes, and 61 percent said the “climate on my campus prevents some people from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.”

While Leftists proudly strut about touting their superior capacity for “tolerance”, those opinions which are opposed to the ones that they espouse are evil, bigoted, intolerant, hateful, etc., and therefore ought to shut down, because opinions that are different from those espoused by the Left are perceived as intrinsically evil, and therefore has no place in this world, and so they must not be tolerated.

The Left, therefore, has a completely different definition of what tolerance is, and completely different understanding of “free speech”, where only that speech can be tolerated with is in accord with their own ideology. They perceived speech in the manner that Henry Ford saw for the colour of his new Model T, “you can have any opinion you like as long as it agrees with mine.”