I like my echo chamber

resolved: people who insist that all social media sites must be places where users are constantly encountering and arguing with people over fundamental disagreement do so because their actual, real lives are echo chambers where they do not encounter any meaningful difference from day-to-day.

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) November 16, 2024 at 1:12 PM

"Echo chamber" is used to criticize people who seek out online spaces and news sources that aren't overtly hostile to us.

You can certainly find people who are opposed to conservative ideology arguing with conservatives, and they are saying all the same things, too. This is also to be expected. I’d say repetition is exactly what you can expect from people who have decided to spend their time persuading unpersuadable people. What that tells me is not that “both sides” are in an echo chamber, but rather it is specifically when debating with unreasonable people to try to persuade them with reason that reason starts to sound as nothing more than an echo of unreason, one of two equal and equivalent sides, as supremacists bring their old predictable lies in support of their positions, and those who oppose them bring the old predictable truths to counter them, until the lies and the truths get mixed up in an overlapping wash of sound.

In worst case scenarios, supremacists even learn to echo their opposition’s own words back at them in twisted ways. Grooming is a real thing, and it’s a real problem, and the people who engage in it are really protected by supremacists, but once the supremacist spirit learned about the term “grooming,” they sharpened the other side and used the word to demonize the trans community, without ceasing their defense of groomers or the institutions that shelter groomers in the least. In fact, using the term “groomers” enhances their defense of groomers, because if you accuse them of grooming (which they are) you now sound just like them, who accuse you of grooming (which you aren’t), and my god but the word “groomer” has lost all meaning in this sentence, which certainly benefits those who defend groomers.

More than that, it helps them establish supremacists, who defend groomers, as the ones who truly oppose grooming.

— Preaching To The Choir. A.R. Moxon. The Reframe. September 17, 2023.

This, I think, is a corollary of all the shame and pathologizing of kids who are different in our culture—an outsize pride taken in kids who seem to check all the boxes, meet all the social standards, are perfect little children. Children in need of protecting, keeping pure from all transgressors. So many of the battles waged in the Mirror World—the “anti-woke” laws, the “don’t say gay” bills, the blanket bans on gender-affirming medical care, the school board wars over vaccines and masks—come down to the same question: What are children for? Are they their own people, and our job, as parents, is to support and protect them as they find their paths? Or are they our appendages, our extensions, our spin-offs, our doubles, to shape and mold and ultimately benefit from? So many of these parents seem convinced that they have a right to exert absolute control over their children without any interference or input: control over their bodies (by casting masks and vaccines as a kind of child rape or poisoning); control over their minds (by casting anti-racist education as the injection of foreign ideas into the minds of their offspring); control over their gender and sexuality (by casting any attempt to discuss the range of possible gender expressions and sexual orientations as “grooming”).

This same inability to see children as autonomous beings is part of the reason why, for so long, disabled children were hidden away in cruel institutions. If a double that reflects well on them is what many parents are after, then disability arrives as an unwelcome interruption to those best-laid plans. Or, in today’s language, if your kid is your brand extension, then having a child who challenges social standards of normalcy might mean that your whole personal brand is in crisis.

— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Complaints about Bluesky being a "left wing enclave" can be safely ignored because they fail to account for the fact that Twitter now privileges and amplifies right wing extremism and no one is obligated to put up with that as a condition of using social media

— Ian Boudreau (@iboudreau.bsky.social) October 19, 2024 at 9:47 AM

I do not want to see Nazis or spend time trying to understand the motivations of Nazis and if that means that I am part of an “echo chamber” sign me up also nobody calling it that has ever spent five minutes trying to get leftists to agree on anything

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— Micah (@rincewind.run) October 19, 2024 at 12:00 PM

anyway, platforms like X are absurd

This strikes me as an apt description of X:

"Much of the information on X is a mixture of irrelevance and falsehood. This morning, thanks to X giving me content I didn’t ask for, I saw an exchange that was characteristic. Nate Silver, the polling analyst, asserted that Kamala Harris was a mediocre presidential candidate. His underlying post gave reasons. This triggered an enraged response from a progressive who considered Silver’s point to be racist, I guess. This, in turn, was shared by some right-wing account that falsely identified the angry progressive as the leader of the Democratic Party. This, in turn, was shared by a billionaire, and then X put this concoction in front of me: a credulous person sharing a falsehood about an angry reaction about an opinion that I didn’t particularly need to begin with."
Steve Inskeep, The decline of social media is good: It’s been terrible at helping us think. Nov 17, 2024