How can one determine "true" sentiment?

thecakeisalime
Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:43:14 +0000

In an age of increasing misinformation and division, I've found that it's increasingly easy to find yourself in an echo chamber of opinions (of people and/or bots). And when I go searching outside that echo chamber, I usually don't find well reasoned discussion, but a different echo chamber with the opposite opinion.

This is especially true on sites like Reddit and Twitter, but also applies to pretty much every website (including Tildes) to some extent. Even newspapers aren't helpful as they are all largely owned by a handful of billionaires with an agenda. And real life isn't much better. My friends and family all share similar values and ideals, which is great for getting along, but it doesn't help me figure out how many people actually support something in particular.

The closest thing I've found to objective polling are elections. Unfortunately, they largely group everything into one of two buckets and don't have room for nuance on individual topics. Also, a lot of people don't even vote, which doesn't necessarily muddy the data, but it does leave out the opinions of a lot of people.

Is it even possible to determine this without an individual referendum on each topic? Am I worrying too much about something unknowable?

Some example issues

(copy/pasted from my reply to chocobean)

1. Belief in annexation of Canada as the 51st state. Most people (that I've seen) are not in favour of this, but some people are super gung-ho about this. Is this bot-led behaviour, or is there really such a large number of people that want to invade Canada? And how many Canadians want to become a state? Is it any, or are they all bots? How can I tell if it's 10%, 1%, or 0.1% of the population that actually wants this? A gut feeling from everything I've seen online tells me that more Americans want this than Canadians, but that doesn't really mean much without an anchor point.

2. Similarly, trampling individual rights (especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ policies). The current US administration is doing everything they can to destroy this. I've seen similar sentiment in Canada, but I don't know how much this is supported by either population. Does everyone who didn't vote or who voted Republican hate queer people? Hopefully not. But there's no way to separate (in the data) a Republican full of hatred from a Republican who thought that Trump would fix the economy and prioritized that above all else. So how many people hate "the gays"? How many people say they don't hate gay people, but also don't care if they're collateral damage in a fight against "transgender indoctrination"? Maybe nuance like that doesn't actually matter, but assuming it does, the nuance disappears in any online discussion and can't be properly observed.

3. Sentiment about [country]'s position in Palestine/Israel. Everything I've seen leads me to believe that almost every politician supports Israel, and almost every non-politician supports Palestine. Obviously there's a lot more nuance to "support" than I'm giving here, but it's hard to actually believe that the divide is so stark and well-defined.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~society/1m2t/how_can_one_determine_true_sentiment

Votes: 13

Comments: 9