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- cross-posted to:
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Summary
Donald Trump’s popularity among Generation Z voters has sharply declined since the 2024 election, according to a new Economist/YouGov poll.
His net favorability among 18-29-year-olds has dropped from +19 in November to -18, raising concerns for Republicans about sustaining youth support.
While Trump gained ground with young voters in 2024, recent policies—such as his mass deportation plan and targeting of DEI initiatives—may have contributed to this decline.
People don’t want to hear the truth. Look at the sales on fiction vs. non-fiction.
That’s not a problem in most media because most of the time people are honest about what’s fiction and what’s non-fiction.
On social media, people have these para-social relationships with the people making the content that makes them want the content creators to be “authentic”. Problem is the algorithms don’t select for actual authenticity, because people prefer fiction over reality. So instead people making content need to appear to be authentic to get the para-social juice, but give people fiction because that’s what people really want.
Adults who remember the times before social media became dominant are better equipped to understand the distinction between the fiction social media presents us from reality. To those raised on this content, what’s on social media is reality.
This is an unfair comparison, it’s like taking university textbook sales and comparing it to the bible and going “clearly people don’t want science and data!”
To be fair, it is probably a true statement, if you were to analyze the content and media that people consume, it’s likely to be very low in “hard facts” so i will give you that one, i just think it’s an unreasonable comparison to be making.
A lot of the big sales in non-fiction (at least the heavily fact valued ones) are going to be books about like, psychology, sociology, math, science, biology, the one weird guy who wrote 20 books on trains because he has an extremely bizarre knowledge based on like three specific trains in general, probably a book about a plane as well, because why not. And a handful of other boring educational books, shit like cookbooks, machining, manufacturing, etc…
I’m not sure how much “based on a true story” bleeds into non-fiction, but i’m basing on a strict separator so.
and to be fair, that’s because it literally is, modern social life has moved to social media, people are lonelier than ever, there’s a reason for it.
I really do think (fear) that may be true, and that’s probably why I go on about teaching media literacy and critical thinking (most especially spotting logical fallacies) so much.
I already think many that were around before social media were ill-equipped as-is (as an example - how many people think “reality television” is not heavily edited and heavily scripted? That artifice came on the scene before social media did and many were and are duped by it); I worry even more about people raised on it, many of them foolishly thinking that knowing their way around apps and certain sites makes them more “media-savvy”, thinking that “my generation” just gets this like no other when it’s definitely a prior generation that has handed them these things.
This kind of thinking - that your generation is somehow uniquely equipped like no other prior human beings before - is complete delusion. It’s not like this conceit is confined to gen alpha or z or whatever, either - virtually every generation has their version of it.
to be completely devils advocate here, the human mind is not a static blob of inputs and outputs, it’s a variable soup of neurons with connections between different neurons as they try and establish patterns and reasons between things. People who have grown up today, compared to people who grew up 200 years ago, are quite literally fundamentally different. Every generation is raised differently to the previous, it’s why every generation behaves differently to the previous generations. It’s just that the difference is less significant than most would think.
The entire reason why “post truth society” is even a thing now is because of this fundamental operation of human psychology, shit changes, and we change with the shit.