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Your Political Facebook Posts Aren't Changing How Your Friends Think (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes:It may be hard to resist airing political grievances or appealing to voters on social media during a U.S. presidential race as heated as this one. But no one wants to hear about your politics, least of all on Facebook. Those long rants about how Trump is a bully and a buffoon, Hillary is a crook, and conspiring against Bernie Sanders has doomed America forever aren't changing voters' minds, a new study found. A staggering 94% of Republicans, 92% of Democrats, and 85% of independents on Facebook say they have never been swayed by a political post, according to Rantic, a firm that sells social media followers. The firm surveyed 10,000 Facebook users who self-identified as Republicans, Democrats, or independents. The only thing those opinionated election posts are doing is damaging your friendships. Nearly one-third of Facebook users surveyed said social media is not an appropriate forum for political discussions. And respondents from each political affiliation admitted they've un-friended people on Facebook because of their political posts.
Nearly one-third of Facebook users surveyed said social media is not an appropriate forum for political discussions.
Then where is the appropriate forum? Seriously, what does this third of users think it's for?
And by the way ...
... a firm that sells social media followers
That makes me sad.
Nope, no sig
The thing is, people THINK they aren't being swayed. Everyone, of course, thinks they've reached their opinion through careful thought and introspection. In actuality, we have a tremendous tendency to believe the very first thing we hear.
A truly insightful AC post - elections in this country are tight, numerically speaking. In the last 40 years, only the re-election of Reagan was the spread more than 45%-55%, which means that a shift of just 6% of the votes would have changed every outcome.
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
Werner Heisenberg
To Be honest, the main difference between socialism and Capitalism is the fact that capitalism actually accounts for greed and deception, while Socialism really cannot.
Why? Because captialism (free economics) is about people being able to make decsions for themselves (libertarian) while socialism says that government should decide for everyone, regardless of how good it is to the individual. Socialism doesn't care about the individual, and therefore the individual is at odds with socialism (and why Socialism punishes individual success).
You can see this in Bernie type people who always seem to spew about the "rich" paying "their fair share" ... and then run off and buy a $600K beach house, his 3rd home. It is all well and good as long as it is the OTHER guy that pays.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Whenever I look into the attacks, they either turn out to either have no real substance, or else be on some subject I really don't care about. They keep saying there's a smoking gun, but all I ever see is smoke. But the attacks seem to be mostly "let's make a lot of smoke, so that people will think, 'where there's smoke there's fire'."
About the worst people really say is "well, she does all the same things all successful politicians do!"
So, I'd say in this case, social media is changing my mind, although in the opposite direction perhaps from the one intended.
(Similar things are partly true of Trump: half of the stuff people accuse him of is out of context or stuff he didn't really said at all. But there's the other half, which is stuff he really did say or do.)
By the way, is it getting any more obvious to anyone that Trump is a Hillary plant?
He seems to act just exactly like what he seems to be: like a reality-television performer who has learned that the more outrageously he talks, the more viewers are attracted to the show.
Every day he's shooting his mouth off with some preposterous remark,
Which gives him more press coverage, which is what he wants.
I think where I have true fear and respect for "sales" is when they convince someone to buy something they didn't even want and they're happy about doing it (I'm specifically excluding outright fraud here, sham products or tricks).
Go listen to Brian Tracy's explanation of the "four walls" sales technique. It's so effective that it was banned in several states.
It's the method historically used by encyclopedia salesmen to dupe people into buying encyclopedias that they didn't really want.
The explanation is disconcerting to the point of frightening, because the technique works so well. And it *was* used in many, many instances of encyclopedia sales.