The Fix: Twitter is for liberals; Pinterest is for conservatives
Want to find all the bigpolitical discussions that are taking place on the Internet? For the most part, they don't exist, according to data released earlier this month by Quantcast -- a service that tracks the demographics of Internet users.
In the aggregate, social media users are younger, more liberal ... andless politically engaged than the general populace. Facebook is the closest thing we have to a neutral and all-inclusive public forum -- and that's only because so many people are onit that the overall politics and demographics of the platform are a wash.
But looking at the demographics ofall people using a social media servicekind of misses the point. In fact,these serviceshost many different groups who often use them in very productive ways (journalists on Twitter, for example). At this point, looking at the demographics of social media site is kind of like looking at the demographics of people who have mailboxes; you can learn a lot more from digging into what people are receiving in them than the fact that they have an address.
Regardless, it is kind of fun to look at how politics function on these different sites.
Herearea few scenes from the front.
Pinterest is one of the most conservative social networking sites -- something that was already established bya Harvard Institute of Politics study of young adults from earlier this year. In 2012, Gawker called Pinterest"the mostinoffensive, white-bread place on the internet, a gated community of perfectly curated boards sprinkled with Etsy-made children's toys and food blog recipes, sheltered from the blasted racist hellscape of the rest of the web."
This photo posted by Ann Romney is what all posts on Pinterest aspire to be.
Quantcast also found that Pinterest users were wealthier and older than the users of other major social-media platforms. Since the site gathers those who want their apartments to look like the unrealistic living spaces in sitcoms, this is not surprising.
Twitter, on the other hand, leans the furthest left and features far more active political creatures than Pinterest. Quantcast found that Twitter users were the one exception to the rule that social media users tend to pay attention to politics far less thanmost Americans. The Harvard Institute of Politics study also found that Twitter users aremore likely to be Democrats.
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The Fix: Twitter is for liberals; Pinterest is for conservatives