Facebook, demographics and the Beeb

Updated
Facebook reveals the BBC as a liberal hotbed

The BBC has frequently been accused of having a liberal bias.

But now the corporation's own staff appear to have confirmed this by revealing their political views on the networking website Facebook.

A survey of BBC employees with profiles on the site showed that 11 times more of them class themselves as "liberal" than "conservative".
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Research by the conservativehome. com website showed that 1,340 staff put themselves in the "liberal" or "very liberal" category, compared with just 120 who were "conservative" or "very conservative". Some 340 regard themselves as "moderate".

Regular readers of my blog certainly know that. A quick survey of my posts can tell you of their love of Che, their conveing al-Qaeda propaganda, and on and on.

Ed Driscoll has some observations on the Beeb's 'Powerfully Corrosive Internal Culture'

Also don't miss this:


Biased BBC has more.

Update:
On the subject of Facebook,
Over at Newsbusters, Matthew Sheffield links to Patrick Ruffini's excellent article, The Early Adopter Effect

It was after I started reached the mid-20s that I stumbled upon something that may help quantify the early adopter bias. High school and college users were pretty consistently about 4-8 points more liberal than conservative. That’s sort of where you’d expect them to be given the 18-29 year old vote. And Facebook’s market penetration with this cohort is such that this is likely to be a highly representative sample of Americans that age.

But the older you got, through users in their 20s, the more liberal the user base became. It was inexorable. Each year, liberals picked up a couple of points on conservatives. My fellow 29-year olds on Facebook are +25.3% liberal. The 20-year old bracket is +4.5% liberal.

Given how stable the numbers were for college/high school users, with much higher numbers, this seemed unlikely to suggest an actual demographic shift in Generation Y.

But something else was going on. As liberals were picking up steam, the number of Facebook users were getting progressively smaller with each age cohort.

It makes perfect sense when you think about it. These users represent early adopters who never used Facebook in college. The people who joined Facebook since it opened up, or finagled a way into it before then using a stray alumni .edu address like I did.

This is pretty strong evidence of a liberal/early adopter correlation. Non-college Facebook users in their late twenties are two to one liberal where their college age counterparts are pretty closely matched.

That two-to-one ratio probably correlates with usage of other high-end web services and even traffic to the candidate sites themselves. It also gives quantifiable backing to the idea that Republicans stand to gain as the universe is widened entering the general election, as I've long suspected.

Here's my facebook page, and I belong to the Newsbusters group, too.
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For more Saturday reading, don't miss The Wahington Times's fabulous round-up.


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