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from the twitter-is-known-for-being-a-place-of-kindness-and-intelligence dept.
El Reg reports in a story that at least some people seem to think so.
Twitter trolls are undermining what political analysts had predicted would be a new form of responsive democracy.
Far from being an opportunity to engage directly with voters, researchers found that the more politicians tried to actively interact with their constituents, the more abuse they faced.
The eggheads, based in Europe and the US, analyzed just under 800,000 tweets from over 650 politicians based in Germany, Greece, Spain and the UK and found that the percentage of "impolite" tweets directed at them went from 8 per cent when they did nothing to an extraordinary 40 per cent when they actively tried to engage with voters.
If that wasn't depressing enough, the paper notes that the level of abuse increases almost exactly proportionally to how engaging people's messages are. The more they asked to hear people's views, the more those views were insulting.
"Most politicians who post anything quickly become subject to constant personal abuse," the paper, published in the Journal of Communication, notes.
Such is the level of unpleasantness and vehemence that most politicians simply give up and use their Twitter accounts to simply broadcast messages rather than seek input or discussion. Something that, ironically, has led to them being criticized for ignoring voters and not being sufficiently open or engaging.
My take: The egg heads may be right on this, however there is nothing inherently undemocratic in people publishing libelous and slanderous crap about politicians. It's been happening in American democracy for at least as long as the republic has been in existence. Some of the things said about Thomas Jefferson when he was running for president were worse than what we were subjected to during this election cycle.
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Monday November 14 2016, @09:31PM
I live in a normally deep blue state and county (63+% counted for Clinton). I went out for beers with some old friends on the 10th and all of the people I presumed would vote democratic *all* voted for Trump. I was quite surprised as this is a group of quite varied backgrounds that are normally not political but generally left leaning and college educated.
I know the counties in this state have a habit of being systematically being bad at math as they report in. Usually not enough to raise eyebrows, and people tend to come clean if it comes to a recount. I suspect that Trump entered the race with a -2% handicap and knew it. Both camps were strongly against a Trump victory.
I believe this election was just as honest as every other election as far as the vote counting is concerned. The media coverage and the rhetoric this time around has been massively slanted, but it's been steadily getting worse over the last 20 years IMO.
I personally have no doubt that more people voted for Trump than Hillary, I was surprised as there were *no* Trump signs anywhere around here. It was somewhat surprising before the election, but after the election it's clear that the Trump voters around here fear[ed?] the public and professional backlash advertising their opinion which in many respects is *far* more chilling than anything else.