Conservative Social News
From a comment on my last post that I felt interesting enough to warrant an entry:
"I thought you were making a claim about some inherent feature of social news which makes it right wing hostile rather than an empirical observation.
Do you think it would be possible to create a right leaning social news site?"
I think there is an inherent feature which makes social news websites lean left, which is that they are on the Internet. Internet traffic disproportionately represents people who are into technology, and those people are very left-leaning. Just look at the top Technorati blogs which are listed by an objective measure called Authority. In the top 10 you have one left-leaning political blog (Huffington Post) and then TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Engadget, Boing Boing, Life Hacker, Ars Technica, Daily Kos, Google Blog, and Smashing Magazine.
So you have a lefty politics blog, followed by 6 blogs aimed at techies, then another 1 lefty blog and 2 more techies. Right-leaning blogs, while sometimes large, are outweighed vastly in terms of traffic by the left. The first one I could find on Technorati was Michelle Malkin, which was number 45. There were at least 5 lefty blogs above it. And here’s the Compete.com traffic graph for the top progressive and the top conservative blogs:
(Neat coincidence that Compete.com colors them blue and red by default.) Note that while there are more registered Democrats in the U.S. than Republicans, it’s by a ratio of less than 1.5:1. I don’t have the time to add them all up, but there’s clearly over a 10:1 ratio (and maybe over 20:1) in terms of blog traffic though, which shows disproportionate representation online.
I suspect it is primarily due to us techies flooding the Internet. We tend to be online all day. Many of us have jobs that have us in front of computers all day at work, and then we go home and screw around on the computer. You can see it in the inordinate amount of traffic to blogs about tech, a subject that only some small percentage of the population cares about.
This isn’t surprising really. Democrats have embraced science, technology, and intellectualism while Republicans have embraced religion and anti-intellectualism. And in politics, people tend to favor the politicians that favor them.
You can pretty much see the difference between the right and the left’s Internet usage in this post about Obama and McCain’s websites.
I’m almost positive you could create a successful right-leaning social news site. I don’t know enough about either political agenda to know where you’d find your initial audience, but I imagine through forums, existing popular blogs. There’s no shortage of conservatives on the web, as Michelle Malkin’s traffic (which is undoubtedly nothing to sneeze at) shows. They’re certainly there. There are less of them, by a big margin, but still a pretty high number.
You might have some problems though, especially if you got big. For one, expect shenanigans from left-leaning hackers and such. I don’t know that they’d have any more desire to DDoS your site than conservative Internet denizens, but they’d have 100x the ability to do it. Or they could simply flood it with Daily Kos stories and vote them up, either manually or with bots. If the front page of Digg is any indication, they’ll do it too.
But, I think you could do it. You might have to spend a good amount of time moderating, but it could still be done.
October 11, 2008 at 9:29 am
At least one person is trying, I'm not sure how hard though.
October 11, 2008 at 3:54 pm
I've been thinking about this a bit more and I think it's deeper than just more tech people being liberal. It has to do with why political satire shows are overwhelmingly liberal and talk radio is overwhelmingly conservative.
The initial audience for sites like reddit and digg was for people who liked learning new stuff. Not any particular thing in general, they just liked the new and the unexpected. I think this runs counter to conservative nature. Conservatives like learning but they like learning about what they already know about.
Talk radio is the bastion of conservatism because you know what to expect. Comedy, on the other hand, thrives on unpredictability and the ability to shock. I don't think it's a co-incidence that poltics falls so neatly across these dividing lines.
My prediction is that email, social networks and blogs will all be conservative leaning medium. It hasn't seemed to have happened for social networks, mainly because of Obama's heavy use of them compared to McCain and because the demographics are still slanted towards liberalism. I don't know why blogs lean liberal, maybe due to the presence of commenting systems as a tipping factor?
October 11, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Also just plain demographics may have something to do with it. Blue states (at least as of 2004 election) are considerably wealthier and better educated than red, so they are probably more likely to have computers and jobs where they work on computers.
I remember after the 2004 election, someone listed all states by income per capita and it was amazing. It was like all of the blue states at the top and the red at the bottom. When sorted by education, it looked almost identical (no shocker really).
I don't know that email can lean one way or the other since it's so private, but I don't see what you mean about blogs or social nets. I see no reason why they wouldn't stay lefty. They'll probably all lean in the same direction as the net on the whole.