Moot/Not Moot: Political Stories at LinkedIn and Other Social Media Sites

by Dr. Ellen Brandt


New readers of the Party of Yes blog may be wondering why we haven't acted upon our promise to publish a follow-up story to How to Solve the "Politics Problem" At LinkedIn and Other Social Sites.


That story related how whenever an overtly political story ran at LinkedIn's Pulse - and many other social media sites - dozens of comments miraculously appeared in the comments-stream, arguing that "social media is not for politics, so ban political stories completely."


Of course, such comments were 20 times  - or perhaps 100 times - more likely to be attached to a story written by or favorable to Republicans than to a story written by or favorable to Democrats. But in terms of our thesis, that is neither here nor there.


As we said in our initial Politics at LinkedIn piece:


". . . . such debates are mostly faux, not only because so many comments-stream participants are Chatbots, rather than Humans, but also because there is now a very fine line between which kinds of articles are political and which (kinds of articles) are not."


That is the thesis we were going to develop in our follow-up piece - and which we will develop shortly.


As to why we haven't published the promised follow-up story yet: About a week after our initial Politics at LinkedIn story appeared, the site began to transform its basic format, creating a dashboard that, among other improvements, allows one to bypass Pulse completely.


You can still subscribe to Pulse and receive its "recommended" feed, which mostly consists of stories from those designated by Pulse editors as INfluencers, overexposed Celebrity contributors of one sort or another, whom many of us don't want to read about again in this lifetime - not one canned word of pabulum more!


But the momentous change in LinkedIn's format has made the debate - faux or not - about whether political stories are desirable or not desirable in LinkedIn's news feed pretty much moot. There no longer is a news feed, at least not a "recommended" feed that appears on users' Home Pages against our wills.


Anything but moot, however, is our original thesis: that there is an extremely fine line between what kinds of stories are political and which are not political.


You can insert extreme bias into any kind of news feed, according to which stories you allow into it and which you do not, who writes those stories, and which of the site's "audiences" you try to persuade - or bully - into reading them.


LinkedIn - as is their complete prerogative - has tried to transform itself into the Internet's premium site for well-qualifed job hunters and those who recruit them.


That's fine! But the old Pulse INfluencers-dominated feed, we believe, was working at cross-purposes to this goal, freezing out and often outright "dissing" a large proportion of the site's most avid participants.


The extreme political bias of those managing the former feed made stories and groups of stories seemingly non-political in their purpose ultra-political in their content and intent.


On the surface, the majority of "recommended" stories in the feed were seemingly about employment, recruitment, and career topics. But under the surface, in the view of most Republicans - who, as in the general U.S. population, make up about 1/2 of all American users of LinkedIn - these so-called job and career stories were often charged with political bias.  


Here are a few examples of what we mean:


***** Stories About Diversity: Many GOP'ers believe this was the number one biased group of stories in the "recommended" feed. The problem is one of (very bad) semantics, because close to 100 percent of such stories were not about real diversity at all. They blatantly advocated affirmative action, which is a concept almost every Republican detests.


Nearly all Americans, no matter what our political affiliation, support real diversity, which means that all groups of American citizens get the same opportunities and assistance and respect as all other groups of American citizens.


So-called affirmative action is the exact opposite. It seeks to give special privileges, special help, special preferences in hiring, college admission, and other competitive situations to groups of some American citizens versus groups of other American citizens.


Republicans believe this is an anti-Democracy agenda, against the core values on which this nation was established, especially our core concept of Meritocracy, which says Americans - and all people - should be rewarded and honored on the basis of their experience and hard work and education and applied intelligence and talent.


Affirmative action, when you take away the glossy "politically correct" wrappings that surround it, is anti-Meritocratic, seeking to give preferences and privileges to Americans based on highly divisive factors: their ethnicity, their gender, their age, or even whom they choose or do not choose to have sex with. This is anathema to most within the GOP.


***** Millennials at the Top of the Social Ladder: The "recommended" feed was obsessed with promoting Millennials, one particular generation, at the expense of every other generation.


An enormously large percentage of articles in the "recommended" feed touted Millennial entrepreneurs, educational and career paths for Millennials, "Millennial values" (whatever that means), and Millennial earnings capacity, which was "supposed to be" greater than the earnings capacity of previous generations.


This emphasis was, of course, not only disturbing, but downright obnoxious to site users of other generations. It was also - well, pretty silly! Over 43 percent of American citizens are now age 50 and over, as were a full 1/2 of all voters in the 2016 election (a statistic expected to grow, not decline, in the elections of 2020, 2024, and 2028).


***** A Dearth of Stories on "Gray" Americans Over Age 50: As Mature Americans age 50 and over become both a larger proportion of the total (legal) U.S. population and a growing majority of American voters, stories about this Other Half of the American populace have nearly disappeared - or been disappeared - on most Official MSM sites dominated by bias towards Democrats. Alas, that included Pulse's former "recommended" feed.


Again, this bias is rather silly and anything but productive for any MSM site or news feed involved in this type of camouflage. Essentially "dissing" over 2 in 5 current American citizens - a proportion which is about to grow, not shrink, over the next decade - seems quixotic as best or spiteful at worst. It accomplishes nothing except polarization, political and otherwise.


The situation got worse, not better, a few months before the old format was phased out, with the appointment of first, a Millennials Editor, charged with looking for stories about and for Millennials, followed by the extraordinary appointment of a High School Editor, seeking contributions from and about Americans in their teens. But No! there was no need seen for a special Editor representing anyone older than Millennials, at least 1/2 of all people who use social media, including LinkedIn.


***** The Rich Are Different From You and Me - Their Voices Get Heard (Whether or Not We Want to Hear Them): The old Pulse feed also went gung ho glorifying gazillionaires and gazillionaire wannabes, in the same way the Globalist Thug-Elite has tried to persuade us to do for decades.


Celebrity career advice stories used to abound - most of them, by  site managers' own admission, written by ghost editors, not by the Celebs themselves.


Yes, an occasional story of this sort is fun. But a steady diet of them is morally, ethically, and emotionally unhealthy, promoting the beliefs that first, the prime accomplishments that make someone important are wealth and fame and second, that following those exalted few deemed INfluencers is better for one's life and career than interacting with one's fellow site users - one's peers who are mere Humans.


***** Whose Gender Gap? Pulse's obsession with the Very Young, at the expense of everybody else, also led to a highly biased view of women in the workplace, who we are, and what we most need.


Again, it is a matter of Demographics. An even greater proportion of American women are now age 50 and over than the proportion of Mature Americans  when both genders are combined, a consequence of women still outliving men by several years. "Gray" American women - those who are over 50 - are fast approaching the 1-out-of-2 mark, in fact.


And Mature women, like all Mature Americans, have been pushed to the bottom of the economic barrel, despite the fact that we tend to be well-educated, highly skilled, and highly motivated, with decades of solid work experience behind us.


You'd never know this from the "recommended" Pulse stream, crowded with career articles relevant to very young women, such as stories on pregnancy and childbirth leave or recruitment stories geared to recent graduates.


Stories on the real "glass ceiling" - the one hitting everyone with gray hair smack on the head - have been completely absent. To add insult to injury, the very few stories about older workers, women and men alike, have - like the Globalist agenda itself - often focused on forcing us "Grays" out of the workforce as quickly as possible and into retirements we not only don't want, but can no longer afford.


***** Dishonesty Not the Best (Immigration) Policy: Even some within the GOP are still getting the immigration issue wrong, but those who lean Democrat are off on tangents so far afield, they may never find their way back to sanity.


At other periods in our history - and the history of the rest of the Developed World (plus China, whose Demographics are very similar to ours) - opening the floodgates to massive immigration from the less-Developed world was a good thing. And at some point in the future, it may be again.


But not now. Because at this moment in American (and World) history, immigration is an economic - and specifically an employment - issue.


The Globalist Thug-Elite, which is now closely aligned with the Democratic Party, have been gleefully - and many Republicans would say, maliciously - creating an Inverted Pyramid economy and culture, with the Very Young - including those masses of Very Young immigrants - replacing the Mature; the Less-Educated replacing the Highly-Educated; the Unskilled replacing the Skilled; the Inexperienced replacing the Experienced.


There are places in the World where such Inverted Pyramid economies have existed for long periods of time: Failed and other marginal States - Somalia, say, or the DRC. Such an economy and such a social structure is the opposite of what we need and want in the United States.


The "recommended" feeds at social media sites could be honest and talk about immigration in this way. But they have not been honest.


***** Higher Education is Being Shaken to Its Roots By a Dystopian "Politically Correct" Environment:" But you'd never know it from the biased news feeds and ChatBot-laden comment-streams at social media sites.


This is a key issue for the majority of Republicans and many Independents - and even for some sane Democrats.


We can barely believe how our Alma Maters, bastions of American ideals and scholarship, have been transformed seemingly overnight into places where Freedom of Thought and Freedom of Speech are no longer welcome; where professors and administrators talk - if not yet, thankfully, act - like anti-American traitors seeking to undermine our elected government; and where mobs of students exhibit what can only be called Fascistic behavior, seeking to ban and banish from campuses anything and anyone they decide they don't like.


The trashing of Higher Education is an "employment topic," if anything is! It brings into question how well-educated many current matriculants and recent graduates are and whether they are being deliberately robbed of their innate ability to think for themselves and evolve into reliable citizens, let alone employees.


The turmoil also puts added emphasis on how potentially disastrous are attempts to impose an Inverted Pyramid economy and social structure on the United States, with the broadly-educated and free-thinking Mature portion of our population kicked out of the workforce to "make room" for youngsters who no longer have academic tradition nor scholarly skills to anchor them.


Again, a general topic of extreme societal, as well as political value, is being swept under the rug and prohibited from appearing in "recommended" news feeds.


***** The World According to (Income) Gap: The vast majority of the Republican voter base - and many Independents who have recently voted Republican - view the more and more serious income gap in the United States, the rest of the Developed World, and our Demographic peer China, as a direct consequence of the Globalist agenda, as put into practice by the One Percenters.


The now catastrophic state of our so-called "good" economy has been camouflaged by an utterly flawed system of statistical releases of job and unemployment data, which ignores the glaring fact that we are living with the lowest labor participation rate since the Great Depression of the 1930s and a veritable army of long-term Unemployed and Underemployed, who now total at least 1 in 3 American citizens.


We've discussed this topic elsewhere, of course, and will continue to do so in many articles to come.


Within the scope of this story, the relevant point is that the Great Gap between a handful of obscenely wealthy individuals and all the rest of us Deplorables (in Hillary Clinton's words) or Roadkill (in Warren Buffett's) is, along with the related theme of the Demise of the Middle Class, the true Big Story of our current historical era.


But it, too, has had no place in Pulse and other "recommended" news feeds.


Could LinkedIn - in its former format - have been perfect in its coverage of topics and stories that would truly engage its American base of users? No, of course not. But it could have been much better - and fairer - and more balanced.


We who are avid LinkedIn users acknowledge its value and importance to us as a network builder; as a way of sharing information within our networks; as a preferred E-mail server for contacting those networks; as a job reference and recruitment site; and as an efficient system for forming and maintaining groups of like-minded individuals.


As a news source, though, many of us were both dissatisfied and disappointed by the former "forced" version of Pulse, its INfluencer system, and its "recommended" news feed.


This news feed could easily have become a positive source of respectful dialogue and debate among users of different cultural, philosophical, and political viewpoints.


With so many other Internet sites seemingly hell-bent on polarizing this nation and this World, spouting nonstop propaganda, rather than encouraging balanced coverage of important issues and public concerns . . . . . Well, with LinkedIn's truly broad U.S. user base, Pulse could have been made into a hero among American news sources.


Perhaps in some future version, it will be.



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