Regarding high intensity American politics

This morning a reasonable, rational Canadian commenter here asked to be taken off the Dissident Politics invite list. I complied. His reason for leaving wasn't exactly what I feared, but it was related and possibly partly what I thought. Here's the dialog.

Hi Germaine, please take me off the invite list here.

OK, will do. Is it because of MC's posts? I'd like to know if that's the case. Sorry to see you go.

No, U.S. politics is just no place for a rational Canadian anymore Germaine. It's not just yours, it's any dedicated U.S. politics site that I am leaving for now.

Thanks. I am sorry you need to go. But I do understand your feelings. What is happening here is insane and unpleasant. Our political situation here is going to get very bad in coming months. I'm not sure our democracy is going to survive. I am very frightened about what is coming down on us. Best wishes. It's been an honor having you here.

What is happening to us and our democracy is very scary, threatening and emotionally draining and frightening. Little about Trump, and MAGA's authoritarianism and deep corruption is close to normal. We have mostly lost our country. The question now is how bad is this going to get? I just don't know. Nor do I have a feel for how likely this can be mostly stopped and at least partly reversed. We are under deadly radical right authoritarian threat.

I am beginning to see why echo chambers exist. Disagreements across the gigantic left-right gulf are ugly and deep. I see why probably most MAGA politics sites flat out banned dissenters and critics. That has spread to left-wing sites, which don't want to hear radical right demagoguery. Are most of the left or liberal politics sites more or less equally demagogic? 

Obviously, neither side has a monopoly on demagogic behavior. But manifestations vary. At least for some topics, there asymmetric echo chambers. A study analyzing COVID-19 discourse on Twitter found that right-leaning users form significantly more isolated echo chambers. Random walk analysis showed right-leaning echo chambers were denser and smaller, with information rarely flowing in or out, while left-leaning communities had more distributed engagement with neutral users. 

An empirical study examined content moderation and found more content removal from conservative users, but primarily because they share more misinformation from low-quality sources. Research published in Nature analyzed 9,000 politically active Twitter users during the 2020 election, finding pro-Trump users were more likely to be suspended, but also shared far more links to low-quality news sites even when quality was determined by Republican-only groups. This pattern held across 16 different countries and multiple platforms from 2016-2023. 

Research data shows significant differences in content moderation preferences. When shown identical false headlines, Democrats had a 69% probability of supporting removal versus 34% for Republicans. Republicans were more than twice as likely to consider content removal as censorship (65% vs 29%). Even when Republicans agreed content was false, they remained half as likely as Democrats to support its removal. Apparently, for a lot of the political right, removing lies and slanders amounts to censorship. 

It seems fair to say that we're in an asymmetric propaganda war of democracy vs radical right authoritarianism.