Left Media Bias bigger than i realized. No matter how you measure (print media, online, page views, paid subscribers, followers, etc) US media leans heavily left, to an extent that surprised me. Most ways I tried back-of-the napkin math have right + right-leaning news sources being below 10%… and even the most generous assessments that include lost of neutral/other outlets still have left + left-leaning above 50% (meaning 5:1 liberal to conservative is the lowest estimate i could find).

Context

The US is pretty evenly split in terms of the two major parties:
> 45% of U.S. adults Republican-ish, 44% Democrat-ish Gallup 2022

Some sources

• Allsides Here’s Allsides review
  their media bias on Allsides.com here’s the site’s own assessment of its own bias
• Googling the top 25 most-subscribed news channels in the United States, and
• Even the more left leaning LLMS can’t help but point out this as a fact of modern media.

Takeaways

• First, this gives me empathy for Republicans. Many American conservatives feel like the underdog, regardless of how much power or influence they yield, because in a very real way, they’re not represented in a substantial part of the public narrative making machine—the media—proportionally. The perception of bias is true despite their being popular conservative outlets with sizable audiences, and as a result the left has influence on public opinion.Impact on Public Trust (but also how come Republicans aren’t better at getting media subscribers?)

• Second, how come Republicans, who are stereotypically thought of us as having more business acumen or money or something, are getting so handily beaten in the media?

• Third, I try not to get involved in politics because I’m scared of loosing connection or turning people off of the value of relatefulness because of my takes, even if they’re nuanced. We’re very good at otherizing people and forgetting to look at nuances. I’m certain I lack nuance. I don’t want a difference of political opinion to get in the way of our connecting. I started writing up this for the TTT email (which I ended up deciding not to send) but I realized others are deeply esconced in politics and way smarter and more educated in the field than I, so I decided to not go there. But here on uptrusting.com I think it’s a cool opporutnity to test; could also be a nice road to empathy, or self-empathy, depending on our identifications.

The VP Debate. Hey y’all,

What we’re up to tonight

Tonight we’re going to have fun, test how UpTrust works with 20-30 people simultaneously using it, and perhaps gain some insight and make some connections.

How to engage

You’re welcome to use the platform however you’d like, and in no way are you restricted to debate topics. We’re using the debate as a launch pad and a orientation of shared experience that we can keep coming back to. Feel free to innovate or do normal stuff, we’re excited to see what we all come up with. Here are some ideas:

• Write longform content
• Do really short stuff
• Speak meta about the process, government, ideology;
• Speak about specific policies, ideas, solutions, possibilities;
• Speak micro / personal / interpersonal about your feelings, your interactions in the moment here, your life
• Inquire into things, asking questions, pondering, inviting reflection and group intelligence
• Be thoughtful
• Be disagreeable
• be silly
• Speak from your heart
• Do whatever feels real, knowing that there’s impact
• Share links or images using Markdown (the formatting guide will show you how)

Disagreement is welcome, and converse like you do in-person

So far in our tests, finding disagreement has been more challenging than the usual social media mishaps. That’s partly why we’re honing in on the Veep debate.

That said, Politics and religion have been polarizing long before social media, so things may get heated. Please remember we are real people, including you of course. We may all get triggered, and that’s OK. We may say something we regret—we can apologize, forgive, and of course we can delete comments. There may be no take-backsies in impact, but there is in visibility :)

Our algorithms mimic how trust and conversation work IRL; however you like to have conversation in person, is probably the ideal way to have conversation here. If you’re empathetic here, fine. If there’s stuff you wouldn’t say in person, don’t say it here. If you want to troll—well, try out one of our Troll Bots, and feel free to post that.

On that note, the bots can be pretty helpful, so try them out and see if it takes your conversations in a new direction.

Known Bugs

We are in active development and there’s a bunch of stuff that is in the middle of being fixed, or even simply improved visually (like the bot promotion look and feel, or topic pages, etc). So sorry, forgive us, thank you, and we love you!

Here are some known bugs that may get in your way:

• Mobile topics—switch to landscape mode (instead of vertical)
• Groups aren’t yet really launched even though it seems like they are
• Sorting and group selection dropdowns sometimes disappear while mousing over
• Occasional posting time weirdness
• Occasional mobile weirdnesses

Please continue to submit feedback

We love all your feedback, seriously, hit that button and let us know.

Not just bugs—also preferences. Here are some requests we gotten and are in the pipeline:
- Various different ways of integrating posts and comments
- Differentiate read from unread content
- Inbox notifications for comments a few layers down
- etc.

Even if we already know it, it may change our priorities if everyone is aligned on wanting or disliking a particular thing.

Race and IQ. I recently got dinner at a hole-in-the-wall asian spot with a geneticist named Razib Khan. Over noodles, and with a concerned glance over his shoulder, he admitted that the science is clear: race is absolutely tied to IQ. Jews are the smartest. Pretty much everyone on the continent of Africa is at the bottom.

This fact alone is controversial, but we have to be able to talk about it, and here’s why:

I nodded, and asked: How many generations does this take to change?

Razib: As little as three generations. For example, the Egyptians used to be the smartest, but a century of inbreeding knocked them to the bottom. Incest drops IQ by 10 points in the first generation. After that the effect weakens.

This is huge. At first glance, the controversial statement seems like a slamdunk for racists the world over. But dig into the details, and you find out 3 generations is enough to change things—this means that race and IQ are not inherently linked as far as we know, they’re just linked in today’s world, because of today’s policies and systems.

Knowing this could actually help us target where we need to focus our interventions for the next three decades. Let’s get us all up!