Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…But it has to be video for people to share it. I think that one in particularly probably is better in video; it’s vivid to see somebody clubbing a whale to death, I assume — I haven’t seen this video. My guess is that in terms of making that matter, the distribution mechanism mattered much more there. When you’re talking about victims, you can find victims from any ideology. There would have been a time on the Internet when you’d have said that Upworthy proved — potentially — that a certain kind of soft, cultural progressivism was going to be dominant online. Then I think we’ve seen sites like Breitbart and IJR, Independent Journal Review, were able to take a form of soft-to-hard cultural conservatism and using almost the exact same techniques send those super-viral as well. If you look at these two kinds of content, you find different victims. With Upworthy it is a young LGBT kid who’s been bullied at school. With IJR you’ll see an elderly grandmother who is victimized for her Christianity. But that they’re both victims still to me seems striking.…

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