Seeing both sides of the aisle

Before the 2020 US Presidential election, I asked my friends on Facebook to tell me three good reasons why someone would want to vote for each candidate. Most people could quickly come up with reasons why someone should vote for “their” person, but struggled with their opponent.

Some thought through it and gave solid answers, while others responded more along the lines of “no one should ever vote for that person for any reason”. Oddly enough, there were people on both sides of the aisle that just could not bring themselves to come up with a single reason why someone might vote for their opponent.

The idea stemmed from a post I saw from a friend of mine, who shared that you should delete any of your friends that “like” Donald Trump’s Facebook page. Here was the post:

There are two big problems with this approach, though:

1. You’re creating a filter bubble. Pre-election, I saw a few people on Facebook very proud of all of the people they were cutting from “the other side”, but those also tend to be the people that consistently “don’t understand why someone would vote for x”.
2. The other problem is that some people (like me) followed the various social accounts for both parties for the sake of staying informed.