“The Bubble.” We hear about it all the time, and in the past, we’ve accused Republicans of living in it. Also known as the Echo Chamber, it’s a place, most typically virtual, where your opinions are bounced back and reinforced, thereby validating your opinion without any form of external critique or exposure to other ideas. The Bubble is seductive. It makes you feel right. It also creates a distorted view of reality and makes your ideas seem like the majority ones.
I think it would be real tempting to live in a bubble here on Daily Kos, but I’m also aware we’ve had prominent voices critiquing Hillary Clinton that are still able to make such critiques to this day without a fear of being banned. Hey, I’m with you. Hillary Clinton’s no angel, and I’m under no delusion that she is. Has she made bad decisions? You bet. Has she only made bad decisions? You’d think so if you stepped into the world of the subreddits.
There’s this weird little phenomenon going on over at the Kossacks for Sanders subreddit, and the Bernie Subreddit, where essentially a circular news cycle is being enforced. This has occurred because they’ve deemed major news sources, and websites formerly considered progressive, as being in the pocket of of Wall Street and the DNC establishment machine (or whatever they’re calling it).
So what do you do when you don’t have any traditional news sources to go to? You make up your own, or at least draw from your own constituency to create news favorable to you.
Like Wall Street Shill, a website essentially designed to attack Obama, Debbie Schultz, and Hillary Clinton. That news gets posted to the Kossacks for Sanders subreddit. Mind you, today’s top post on WSS is a meme article with this image:
Now occasionally, they appeal to somewhat more traditional sources, such as the Huffington Post. In these cases, however, they have one go-to-guy for their appeals: Seth Abramson, an Assistant Professor of Experimental Writing who is apparently now a source of authority for the Sanders fans. In an article just this month, he took every worst-case hypothetical scenario to scare up the supporters:
Imagine — I mean really imagine— that you’re watching CNN on June 7th and Hillary has just lost California, New Jersey, New Mexico, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. This comes on the heels of losses in Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oregon. Clinton hasn’t won a state since April; she’s behind Donald Trump in national polling; she’s tied with or behind Donald Trump in all of the battleground states; she’s lost the pledged-delegate battle to Bernie Sanders 53 percent to 47 percent since March 1st; she’s lost 19 of the final 25 state primaries and caucuses; her unfavorables are the highest of any Democrat the Party has considered running since World War II; she’s losing independent voters to Donald Trump; she’s still under investigation by the FBI, and an international criminal is claiming (credibly) that he successfully hacked her basement server and stole classified and top-secret data; 40 percent of Sanders supporters are saying they won’t vote for her; and she’s come to look exactly like two other Democratic losers — unlikable policy wonks Al Gore and John Kerry — rather than the movement candidate Bernie Sanders is and Barack Obama was.
These KfS and Bernie Redditors are going to a man who brigaded his own poll to get the results he wanted showing there was demand for a Bernie-Trump debate. This poll was drawn entirely from Abramson’s own Bernie supporters. So, while these supporters accuse Hillary supporters of living in a bubble, they actively support a man who created a bubble by purposely slanting polls and then publishing the results in a major news outlet that was then touted by Bernie supporters in their subreddits.
Then there’s Counterpunch, where the top results of a Hillary Clinton search produce the following:
Hillary Clinton: the Queen of Chaos and the Threat of World War III
How Hillary Clinton Bought the Loyalty of 33 State Democratic Parties
Hillary Clinton Will Lose to Donal Trump
Hillary Clinton and the End of the Democratic Party
Hillary Clinton, the Conveniently Negligent Queen
5 Reasons Not to Vote for Hillary Clinton
Real fair and balanced there. So, these talking points filter onto the subreddits before disseminating outward onto other parts of the internet, including Daily Kos. Also, strangely, the Inquisitor, which is a site I’d never heard about until it started popping up so prominently on the Sanders subreddits, which again produces articles like these in the top results:
Hillary Clinton May Face Racketeering Charges [Update]
Hillary Clinton Urged To Drop Out Of The Presidential Race
Hillary Clinton Vs. Donald Trump: Polls Show Many Millennial Voters Turning Toward Trump If They Can't Have Sanders
If all I read for my news sources was how much Hillary couldn’t be trusted and how terrible she was, I’d be posting in subreddits too with comments about how I hate Clinton supporters or how Clinton and Trump are maybe kind of in a secret buddy conspiracy to give Clinton the presidency. In a bubble, outlier polls become the gold standard, rather than what they are: outliers. Why? Because they validate our position. In a bubble, it’s easy to dismiss the surveys proving us wrong, because those surveys are conducted by untrustworthy branches of the media. History becomes no measure. I’m sure this quote on what is likely to happen in the General Election is worthless to a hardcore Bubble dweller because it conflicts with Seth Abramson’s statements:
Political scientists call this phenomenon the “reinforcement effect.” It was described in 1940 in the first major study of a presidential campaign. The study’s authors…noted that voters tended to “join the fold to which they belong,” with Democrats gravitating to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Republicans to Wendell Willkie. These voters were not blindly following whichever shepherds their parties nominated, the study concluded. Rather, their partisan loyalties reflected their underlying values, and the parties’ nominees solidified their support by emphasizing these same values as the campaign unfolded.
If you continue to follow the Bubble created trail of conspiracy, you can come up with all sorts of inferences. If Hillary can corrupt the media, can’t she also corrupt the primaries? Is she behind the Bernie losses? Is she the reason people’s votes are getting lost? How badly has she corrupted the votes?
The rabbit hole never ends when you start down it. In the real world, though, the majority of people don’t read the news cycle 24/7 and they don’t spend all their time reading political blogs and subreddits. It’d likely be another form of the Bubble to assume political behavior online is identical to how it plays in real space.
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