I totally disagree that this study can show this. "Internet non-user" is not a meaningful comparison category for 2016. The whole ecology of information has shifted and everyone is affected—even if you never touched a computer. Hard to measure, sure, but this isn't that measure.
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Replying to @zeynep @WillOremus
I turned on CNN yesterday & it was all about Trump's tweets. Fox News clearly shifted in content in 2016 to competewith Breitbart which has been top performer on Facebook during most of 2016. There's no "non-internet user" (already a tiny category) that is isolated from all this.
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Replying to @zeynep @WillOremus
Maybe 10% of the US population is not on the internet (the authors didn't have a reliable, recent measure so they use an estimate—I can't find a data table for the estimate) and the idea they are totally isolated from info ecology shift and a good comparison group doesn't hold./
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Replying to @zeynep @WillOremus
I agree with your skepticism of any isolation from net ecology, but I also think it's fair to say that television (even if regurgitating net info) was an even better friend of Trump because it amplified all this Trump news/info + spewed its routine oversimplified "wisdom" on them
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Replying to @chrhend @WillOremus
TV and internet are not separate like that anymore. TV competes for online stuff or attention; TV incessantly covers whatever happens online and has been for a long time; TV people play to social media and vice versa etc. etc. etc. ~10% non-users not a good comparison group.
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Replying to @zeynep @WillOremus
Right, agreed. But there has been a growing conventional wisdom that attributes a Trump victory to Internet-specific things like memes and clickbait fake news, and that’s not really accurate.
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Shift in the information ecology due to digital technologies is absolutely a part of the story. Like any historical phenomenon worth discussing, it's not mono-causal. Whatever the complexity, I don't see how the tiny internet non-users as a comparison group answers this question.
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Replying to @zeynep @WillOremus
Yes. 100% Long live nuance and complexity! :)
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