this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
1196 points (95.8% liked)
Political Memes
5408 readers
5018 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I’m afraid to ask, but I have to. If you extrapolate the data that is available to you, where does the general trend lead you? Riots? Civil War? Fascism?
We can't really extrapolate the data in that way for predictive models. I wish we could! The general consensus around the data set we currently have combining intergenerational data above youth cohorts indicates a higher probability for more authoritarian forms of government, and this seems to be a global trend.
Youth cohorts are some of the most strongly correlated demographics that align with pro government stances. What that means is that while governments in the western hemisphere continue to exert more control over the social lives of the nations within which they hold sway, young people, for this data means younger than 35, tend to still feel that state governments should be in control and support the idea of state control.
That's generally normal, however there has been a big flip in young people that express anti-government stances, and that does tend to be overwhelmingly from political ideologies that we might typically think of as on the right.
We have limited data for the past century, but most analysis done has shown that the general majority of anti-state positions held by youth in the western hemisphere were typically left-leaning after about 1918--to be sure, world wars tend to dramatically reorganize political thinking among youth.
Nevertheless, anti-state youth sentiment generally decreased following major wars. That is not the case anymore, and that is actually a huge swing from even the 1990s to now. Most young people are extremely pro government and pro state. Historically we would call that reformist, so I would characterize the young "left" as reformist and the young "right" as radical, broadly speaking.
In terms of riots and civil war, if you mean the United States or Canada, no... at least probably not how you're thinking. The chance of civil disturbances continues to increase. But Civil War in North America won't ever look like the history books. It will be asymmetric and non-continuous. If you're waiting for the "beginning of the war," there won't be one.
As we like to say, there will be no declaration of war. There will only be a recognition of when it ends.
Thanks for your time and interpretations. Hope your work and data makes a difference.
Appreciate it. Data is always subject to change with more data, and we live in a time of dramatic shifting sentiment around political ideologies. A result, I think, of the climate crisis and the rise in social media since about 2013 or so. Obviously social media existed before that, but there is a pronounced shift between about 2013-2015 in the data sets for reasons that remain under discussion with our analysts.
That’s easy…
That’s also when the Internet Research Agency went online.
Indeed. And also after Facebook researchers posted their findings about manipulating both emotion and behavior of users with their feed in the 2014 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Simpler time then, it would seem! Lol