Pennsylvnia Federation of College Republicans

With the advent of the Internet common citizens now more than ever before around the United States and world find themselves better able to project their own political thoughts. This fact is particularly true as social trends in the Web 2.0 generation take hold. Social news websites such as Digg , Reddit , and Propeller allow users to vote a particular story to the front page, demand and direct massive traffic to other websites throughout the Internet.

Even we, as the Pennsylvania College Republicans, promote our stories via Digg . There is an inherent danger associated with many of these websites, however. The transformation of Digg is especially startling. Stories initially covered by the site had a heavy technology emphasis. As time went on and Digg became more popular, technological stories soon took a backseat to mostly liberal political news. The transformation is also true in Reddit’s case as well if only to a lesser extent.

To be fair, each and every submitted story has an equal chance of being voted to the front page regardless of content should the social community decide the story is worthy of the attention. As time goes on, the political bias of each story attracts new users who share similar views. And these users promptly begin to link to sites with views similar to their own. Over time a massive case of groupthink develops. Symptoms of this can be found in many current day social news networks.

Have you ever wondered about a particular websites political bias? Look no further than Presidential Watch 08 , which provides a political bias visualization of 533 different websites covering political news.

The results? Conservative and liberal websites are spread fairly equal across the spectrum. Of the 533 sites, 220 or 41.4% of websites are considered liberal in their slant, while 210 or 39.5% of the websites are considered conservative in their slant.

I encourage you to check out Presidential Watch 08 . The slant of the sites you read may surprise you.

Tags: Political Bias, The Web, Tyler Smith, Web 2.0

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 8:38 am by TSmith and is filed under Viewpoint. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.