Today comes news that there's outrage over the Saturday Night Live skit about ISIS this weekend.
You will hear newscasters bandy around phrases like "sparked outrage" or "social media is abuzz" and then of course the gratuitous request for viewers to Tweet or email in with their own vote.
Something similar happened when Sean Penn, during the Oscars, made a joke about Alejandro González Iñárritu's green card. Again, it was as if huge numbers of people--and the presumption is these people are liberals--were offended by this comment.
All of which makes it seem like liberals are these overly sensitive, humorless, self-righteous members of the thought police. And it's that kind of stuff that sparks attacks on political correctness like the recent one by Jonathan Chait, which has gotten oodles of attention despite his providing of only anecdotal evidence to support his claim that PC liberals are out of control.
Now here's reality:
According to topsy, which tracks trends on Twitter, the number of posts with both ISIS and SNL in them since the show's airing on Saturday night hasn't gone higher than 8,000.
Similarly, if you look at tweets for Sean Penn after the Oscars, it tops off at 80,000, which is about 6 percent of the Oscar-watching audience. And that doesn't tell you how many of the Tweets said Penn's remarks were offensive and those which were responses saying there was nothing offensive about it at all.
The metrics of social media are imprecise enough that anyone can make any claim about it at all. And right now, that's working to liberals' disadvantage.
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