title: Mercedes-Benz X-Class

text: The Mercedes-Benz X-Class (W470) is a luxury pickup truck that was sold by the German automaker Mercedes-Benz, a division of German multinational company Daimler AG. Unveiled at a world premiere in Cape Town, South Africa in July 2017, the pickup took its chassis from the Nissan Navara and employed many Mercedes-specific features and technologies, including some engines not shared with the Navara. It first went on sale in late 2017.


title: Mercedes-Benz X-Class

text: In 2015, Mercedes-Benz announced that development of a pickup truck was in the works. The new vehicle, developed in conjunction with the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, was to be assembled at Nissan and Renault plants in Europe and South America.


title: Mercedes-Benz X-Class

text: On 25 October 2016, Mercedes-Benz announced a concept class called the X-Class Concept. Dieter Zetsche, Daimler Chairman and head of Mercedes-Benz cars, said it would help a growing segment. It was slated to be only available in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Latin America, and Africa. The top-of-the-range engine is a turbocharged diesel V6 paired with a 4Matic permanent all-wheel-drive system.


title: Mercedes-Benz X-Class

text: Production started in 2017 at the Nissan factory in Spain. Plans to produce the pickup at the Renault plant in Santa Isabel, Argentina were cancelled due to alleged contractual disputes between executives from both marques.


title: Mercedes-Benz X-Class

text: According to Mercedes, the X-Class would be the world's first true "premium" pick-up truck, followed by the failed Lincoln Blackwood and Lincoln Mark LT, two upmarket versions of the Ford F-150, along with the also-failed Cadillac Escalade EXT, an upmarket version of the Chevrolet Avalanche that turns out to be a short-bed version of the Chevrolet Tahoe/Suburban, and in other words, a pickup variant of the full-size luxury SUV. Of these, the X-Class only managed to last longer on the market than the Lincoln Blackwood.


title: Mercedes-Benz X-Class

text: Global sales of the X-Class in 2018, its first full year on the market, were just 16,700 in Europe, Australia and South Africa. It further decreased to around 15,300 in 2019, with 2,186 sold in Australia alone. Production ot the X-Class was halted in May 2020 due to slow sales. The slow sales are primarily attributed to a negative perception of the vehicle's platform. It was argued that many customers expected an entirely new vehicle designed and built by Mercedes and were underwhelmed when it was instead presented as a joint-venture with Nissan/Renault. This issue was further compounded with the use of Nissan/Renault engines in lower end trim levels. Despite the X350 sharing the same V6 diesel engine platform as the G-Class and other Mercedes models, public perception was that the X-Class was an expensive rebrand of a Nissan Navara, an image it struggled to shake throughout its short production run.


title: Mercedes-Benz X-Class

text: On 19 July 2017, the promotional video/advertising spot "Mercedes-Benz X-Class: Pickup Meets Lifestyle – Trailer" was released, with "We Are Young" song by Blues Saraceno as soundtrack.


title: Carlos Kaiser (footballer)

text: Carlos Henrique Raposo (born 2 April 1963), commonly known as Carlos Kaiser, is a Brazilian con artist and former footballer who played as a striker. Although his abilities were far short of professional standard, he managed to sign for numerous teams during his decade-long career. He never actually played a regular game, the closest occurrence ending in a red card whilst warming up, and hid his limited ability with injuries, frequent team changes, and other ruses.


title: Carlos Kaiser (footballer)

text: Nicknamed "Kaiser" due to a purported resemblance to Franz Beckenbauer when he was young (although his friend Luiz Maerovitch claims that the nickname stems from a resemblance to a bottle of Kaiser beer), Carlos Raposo began his youth career at Botafogo, then moved to Flamengo. In 1979, he impressed the scouts of Puebla during a training session and was signed by the Mexican club, although he was released months after without playing a single match.


title: Carlos Kaiser (footballer)

text: He later returned to Brazil and began a career as a farce footballer since he "wanted to be a footballer, but did not want to play football", becoming a friend of many footballers such as Carlos Alberto Torres, Ricardo Rocha and Renato Gaúcho so that he would have a big network to be recommended whenever he needed to transfer to a new club. With a physical shape similar to professional footballers, but lacking skills, his fraud consisted of signing a short contract and stating that he was lacking match fitness so that he would spend the first weeks only with physical training where he could shine. When he had to train with other players, he would feign a hamstring injury; the technology at the time made it difficult to detect the fraud. He had a dentist who claimed he had focal infection whenever any club wanted to go further. By following these steps, he managed to stay a few months at the various clubs just training and without ever being exposed as a fraud.


title: Carlos Kaiser (footballer)

text: Another tactic was to befriend journalists so that they would write fictional stories about him. In one newspaper article, it was reported that he had such a great time at Puebla that he was even invited to become a Mexican citizen to play for the national team. He also used toy mobile phones, expensive and uncommon at the time, to create fake conversations in foreign languages or reject non-existent transfer offers to create an image of himself as a valuable player.


title: Carlos Kaiser (footballer)

text: Upon returning to Brazil, Kaiser went back to Botafogo, starting his farce career. While employing his fake injury scam, he also made use of the toy mobile phone scam by pretending to speak English to buy himself more time at the club, but was later discovered by a club doctor who was fluent in English. He later rejoined Flamengo and stayed a few months with the same injury scam.


title: Carlos Kaiser (footballer)

text: Amongst his scams, he claimed that he played in Argentina at Talleres de Córdoba and Independiente, being brought by a man named "Alejandro", who was a friend of Jorge Burruchaga and claiming that he was part of the squad that won both the 1984 Copa Libertadores and the 1984 Intercontinental Cup by portraying himself as Carlos Enrique, an Argentinian player who was genuinely part of the squad.


title: Carlos Kaiser (footballer)

text: In 1986, he allegedly moved to Europe and joined French Division 2 club Gazélec Ajaccio where a friend was playing. At his presentation, the club arranged a training session with the fans and, afraid of being caught, he shot all the balls to the crowd while kissing the club's badge. He barely played at the club and returned to Brazil the following year, although his friendship with journalists later earned him an article where he was depicted as a top goalscorer at Gazélec Ajaccio where he had played for eight seasons. However, the friend, Fabio "Fabinho" Barros who played at Ajaccio for four years, says that Kaiser never actually went to Corsica. Instead, the two of them took photographs of Kaiser wearing an Ajaccio jersey that Barros gave to him as a present at a field in Horto. Barros states that Kaiser later used these photographs, as well as a forged player identification card as "proof" of his time in France.


title: Carlos Kaiser (footballer)

text: Returning to Brazil, he joined Bangu, where he again used his fake injury scam. However, Castor de Andrade, the club's major sponsor and patron, became tired of seeing him just training. During one match, Castor told the coach to play him, as the team was losing 2–0. When Kaiser was sent to warm up, he saw a group of supporters shouting abuse at the players and started to fight them, for which he immediately received a red card without even participating in the actual match. After the match, he lied to the patron that the supporters called him a thief. He was forgiven and earned a six-month extension.


title: Carlos Kaiser (footballer)

text: Kaiser also had a spell at Fluminense where, together with his injury scam, he again used a toy mobile phone to pretend to reject offers from other clubs, stating that he was happy at the club, but was caught by an assistant. He later joined Vasco da Gama, where he was signed to help a teammate to overcome an alcohol problem as he did not drink and had a reputation of being a good person.


title: Carlos Kaiser (footballer)

text: In November 2015 Kaiser signed an exclusive agreement with a UK production company, Nods & Volleys Entertainment Limited, which was specifically incorporated to tell his story on all media formats. Interview filming on a cinematic release was completed in December 2016.


title: Carlos Kaiser (footballer)

text: "Kaiser! The Greatest Footballer Never to Play Football" had its world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival on 21 April 2018. The film features contributions from Carlos Alberto Torres, Zico, Renato Gaucho, Bebeto, Junior and Ricardo Rocha.


title: Carlos Kaiser (footballer)

text: The book "Kaiser: The Greatest Footballer Never to Play Football", by the journalist Rob Smyth, was published in 2018.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, BDI-1A, BDI-II), created by Aaron T. Beck, is a 21-question multiple-choice self-report inventory, one of the most widely used psychometric tests for measuring the severity of depression. Its development marked a shift among mental health professionals, who had until then, viewed depression from a psychodynamic perspective, instead of it being rooted in the patient's own thoughts.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: In its current version, the BDI-II is designed for individuals aged 13 and over, and is composed of items relating to symptoms of depression such as hopelessness and irritability, cognitions such as guilt or feelings of being punished, as well as physical symptoms such as fatigue, weight loss, and lack of interest in sex.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: There are three versions of the BDI—the original BDI, first published in 1961 and later revised in 1978 as the BDI-1A, and the BDI-II, published in 1996. The BDI is widely used as an assessment tool by health care professionals and researchers in a variety of settings.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: The BDI was used as a model for the development of the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI), first published in 1979 by clinical psychologist Maria Kovacs.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: According to Beck's publisher, 'When Beck began studying depression in the 1950s, the prevailing psychoanalytic theory attributed the syndrome to inverted hostility against the self.' By contrast, the BDI was developed in a novel way for its time; by collating patients' verbatim descriptions of their symptoms and then using these to structure a scale which could reflect the intensity or severity of a given symptom.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: Beck drew attention to the importance of "negative cognitions" described as sustained, inaccurate, and often intrusive negative thoughts about the self. In his view, it was the case that these cognitions "caused" depression, rather than being generated "by" depression.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: Beck developed a triad of negative cognitions about the world, the future, and the self, which play a major role in depression.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: An example of the triad in action taken from Brown (1995) is the case of a student obtaining poor exam results:


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: The development of the BDI reflects that in its structure, with items such as "I have lost all of my interest in other people" to reflect the world, "I feel discouraged about the future" to reflect the future, and "I blame myself for everything bad that happens" to reflect the self. The view of depression as sustained by intrusive negative cognitions has had particular application in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which aims to challenge and neutralize them through techniques such as cognitive restructuring.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: The original BDI, first published in 1961, consisted of twenty-one questions about how the subject has been feeling in the last week. Each question had a set of at least four possible responses, ranging in intensity. For example:


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: When the test is scored, a value of 0 to 3 is assigned for each answer and then the total score is compared to a key to determine the depression's severity. The standard cut-off scores were as follows:


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: Some items on the original BDI had more than one statement marked with the same score. For instance, there are two responses under the Mood heading that score a 2: (2a) "I am blue or sad all the time and I can't snap out of it" and (2b) "I am so sad or unhappy that it is very painful".


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: The BDI-IA was a revision of the original instrument developed by Beck during the 1970s, and copyrighted in 1978. To improve ease of use, the ""a" and "b" statements" described above were removed, and respondents were instructed to endorse how they had been feeling during the preceding two weeks. The internal consistency for the BDI-IA was good, with a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of around 0.85, meaning that the items on the inventory are highly correlated with each other.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: However, this version retained some flaws; the BDI-IA only addressed six out of the nine DSM-III criteria for depression. This and other criticisms were addressed in the BDI-II.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: The BDI-II was a 1996 revision of the BDI, developed in response to the American Psychiatric Association's publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, which changed many of the diagnostic criteria for Major Depressive Disorder.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: Items involving changes in body image, hypochondriasis, and difficulty working were replaced. Also, sleep loss and appetite loss items were revised to assess both increases and decreases in sleep and appetite. All but three of the items were reworded; only the items dealing with feelings of being punished, thoughts about suicide, and interest in sex remained the same. Finally, participants were asked to rate how they have been feeling for the past two weeks, as opposed to the past week as in the original BDI.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: Like the BDI, the BDI-II also contains about 21 questions, each answer being scored on a scale value of 0 to 3. Higher total scores indicate more severe depressive symptoms. The standardized cutoffs used differ from the original:


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: One measure of an instrument's usefulness is to see how closely it agrees with another similar instrument that has been validated against information from a clinical interview by a trained clinician. In this respect, the BDI-II is positively correlated with the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale with a Pearson r of 0.71, showing good agreement. The test was also shown to have a high one-week test–retest reliability (Pearson r =0.93), suggesting that it was not overly sensitive to daily variations in mood. The test also has high internal consistency (α=.91).


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: The development of the BDI was an important event in psychiatry and psychology; it represented a shift in health care professionals' view of depression from a Freudian, psychodynamic perspective, to one guided by the patient's own thoughts or "cognitions". It also established the principle that instead of attempting to develop a psychometric tool based on a possibly invalid theory, self-report questionnaires when analysed using techniques such as factor analysis can suggest theoretical constructs.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: The BDI was originally developed to provide a quantitative assessment of the intensity of depression. Because it is designed to reflect the depth of depression, it can monitor changes over time and provide an objective measure for judging improvement and the effectiveness or otherwise of treatment methods. The instrument remains widely used in research; in 1998, it had been used in over 2000 empirical studies. It has been translated into multiple European languages as well as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Xhosa.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: The BDI has the same limitations as other self-report inventories, in that scores can be easily exaggerated or minimized by the person completing them. Like all questionnaires, the way the instrument is administered can have an effect on the final score. If a patient is asked to fill out the form in front of other people in a clinical environment, for instance, social expectations have been shown to elicit a different response compared to administration via a postal survey.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: In participants with concomitant physical illness the BDI's reliance on physical symptoms such as fatigue may artificially inflate scores due to symptoms of the illness, rather than of depression. In an effort to deal with this concern Beck and his colleagues developed the "Beck Depression Inventory for Primary Care" (BDI-PC), a short screening scale consisting of seven items from the BDI-II considered to be independent of physical function. Unlike the standard BDI, the BDI-PC produces only a binary outcome of "not depressed" or "depressed" for patients above a cutoff score of 4.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: Although designed as a screening device rather than a diagnostic tool, the BDI is sometimes used by health care providers to reach a quick diagnosis.


title: Beck Depression Inventory

text: The BDI is copyrighted; a fee must be paid for each copy used. There is no evidence that the BDI-II is more valid or reliable than other depression scales, and public domain scales such as the Patient Health Questionnaire – Nine Item (PHQ-9) have been studied as a useful tool.


title: Silent majority

text: The silent majority is an unspecified large group of people in a country or group who do not express their opinions publicly. The term was popularized by U.S. President Richard Nixon in a televised address on November 3, 1969, in which he said, "And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support." In this usage it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time, who did not join in the counterculture, and who did not participate in public discourse. Nixon, along with many others, saw this group of Middle Americans as being overshadowed in the media by the more vocal minority.


title: Silent majority

text: Preceding Nixon by half a century, it was employed in 1919 by Calvin Coolidge's campaign for the 1920 presidential nomination. Before that, the phrase was used in the 19th century as a euphemism referring to all the people who have died, and others have used it before and after Nixon to refer to groups of voters in various nations of the world.


title: Silent majority

text: 'The majority' or 'the silent majority' can be traced back to the Roman writer Petronius, who wrote "abiit ad plures" (he is gone to the majority) to describe deceased people, since the dead outnumber the living. (In 2011 there were approximately 14 dead for every living person.). The phrase was used for much of the 19th century to refer to the dead. Phrases such as "gone to a better world", "gone before", and "joined the silent majority" served as euphemisms for "died". In 1902, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan employed this sense of the phrase, saying in a speech that "great captains on both sides of our Civil War have long ago passed over to the silent majority, leaving the memory of their splendid courage."


title: Silent majority

text: In May 1831, the expression "silent majority" was spoken by Churchill C. Cambreleng, representative of New York state, before 400 members of the Tammany Society. Cambreleng complained to his audience about a U.S federal bill that had been rejected without full examination by the United States House of Representatives. Cambreleng's "silent majority" referred to other representatives who voted as a bloc:


title: Silent majority

text: In 1883, an anonymous author calling himself "A German" wrote a memorial to Léon Gambetta, published in "The Contemporary Review", a British quarterly. Describing French Conservatives of the 1870s, the writer opined that "their mistake was, not in appealing to the country, but in appealing to it in behalf of a Monarchy which had yet to be defined, instead of a Republic which existed; for in the latter case they would have had the whole of that silent majority with them."


title: Silent majority

text: In 1919, Madison Avenue advertising executive and Republican Party supporter Bruce Barton employed the term to bolster Calvin Coolidge's campaign for the 1920 Republican Presidential nomination. In "Collier's" magazine, Barton portrayed Coolidge as the everyman candidate: "It sometimes seems as if this great "silent majority" had no spokesman. But Coolidge belongs with that crowd: he lives like them, he works like them, and understands."


title: Silent majority

text: Referring to Charles I of England, historian Veronica Wedgwood wrote this sentence in her 1955 book "The King's Peace, 1637–1641": "The King in his natural optimism still believed that a silent majority in Scotland were in his favour."


title: Silent majority

text: While Nixon was serving in 1955 as vice-president to Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and his research assistants wrote in his book "Profiles in Courage", "Some of them may have been representing the actual sentiments of the silent majority of their constituents in opposition to the screams of a vocal minority..." In January 1956, Kennedy gave Nixon an autographed copy of the book. Nixon wrote back the next day to thank him: "My time for reading has been rather limited recently, but your book is first on my list and I am looking forward to reading it with great pleasure and interest." Nixon wrote "Six Crises", some say his response to Kennedy's book, after visiting Kennedy at the White House in April 1961.


title: Silent majority

text: In 1967, labor leader George Meany asserted that those labor unionists (such as himself) who supported the Vietnam War were "the vast, silent majority in the nation." Meany's statement may have provided Nixon's speechwriters with the specific turn of phrase.


title: Silent majority

text: Barbara Ehrenreich and Jay Caspian Kang later argued that awareness by the media and politicians that there actually might be a silent majority opposed to the anti-war movement was heightened during the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, especially in reaction to the widely broadcast violence by police against protesters and media there. The media reacted indignantly "against the police and the mayor" after journalists and protesters were attacked and beaten by the police, but were stunned to find that a poll showed 56% of those surveyed "sympathized with the police". "Overnight the press abandoned its protest", awaking "to the disturbing possibility that they had grown estranged from a sizable segment of the public."


title: Silent majority

text: In the months leading up to Nixon's 1969 speech, his vice-president Spiro T. Agnew said on May 9, "It is time for America's silent majority to stand up for its rights, and let us remember the American majority includes every minority. America's silent majority is bewildered by irrational protest..." Soon thereafter, journalist Theodore H. White analyzed the previous year's elections, writing "Never have America's leading cultural media, its university thinkers, its influence makers been more intrigued by experiment and change; but in no election have the mute masses more completely separated themselves from such leadership and thinking. Mr. Nixon's problem is to interpret what the silent people think, and govern the country against the grain of what its more important thinkers think."


title: Silent majority

text: On October 15, 1969, the first Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam demonstrations were held, attracting thousands of protesters. Feeling very much besieged, Nixon went on national television to deliver a rebuttal speech on November 3, 1969, where he outlined "my plan to end the war" in Vietnam. In his speech Nixon stated his policy of Vietnamization would lower American losses as the South Vietnamese Army would take on the burden of fighting the war; announced his willingness to compromise provided that North Vietnam recognized South Vietnam; and finally promised he would take "strong and effective measures" against North Vietnam if the war continued. Nixon also implicitly conceded to the anti-war movement that South Vietnam was really not very important as he maintained that the real issue was the global credibility of the United States, as he stated his belief that all of America's allies would lose faith in American promises if the United States were to abandon South Vietnam. Nixon ended his speech by saying all of this would take time, and asked for the public to support his policy of winning "peace with honor" in Vietnam as he concluded: "And so tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support. Let us be united for peace. Let us be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that". The public reaction to the "silent majority speech" was very favorable at the time and the White House phone lines were overwhelmed with thousands of phone calls in the hours afterward as too many people called to congratulate the president for his speech.


title: Silent majority

text: Thirty-five years later, Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan recalled using the phrase in a memo to the president. He explained how Nixon singled out the phrase and went on to make use of it in his speech: "We [had] used 'forgotten Americans' and 'quiet Americans' and other phrases. And in one memo I mentioned twice the phrase 'silent majority,' and it's double-underlined by Richard Nixon, and it would pop up in 1969 in that great speech that basically made his presidency." Buchanan noted that while he had written the memo that contained the phrase, "Nixon wrote that speech entirely by himself."


title: Silent majority

text: Nixon's silent majority referred mainly to the older generation (those World War II veterans in all parts of the U.S.) but it also described many young people in the Midwest, West and in the South, many of whom eventually served in Vietnam. The Silent Majority was mostly populated by blue collar white people who did not take an active part in politics: suburban, exurban and rural middle class voters. They did, in some cases, support the conservative policies of many politicians.


title: Silent majority

text: According to columnist Kenneth Crawford, "Nixon’s forgotten men should not be confused with Roosevelt's," adding that "Nixon's are comfortable, housed, clad and fed, who constitute the middle stratum of society. But they aspire to more and feel menaced by those who have less."


title: Silent majority

text: In his famous speech, Nixon contrasted his international strategy of political realism with the "idealism" of a "vocal minority." He stated that following the radical minority's demands to withdraw all troops immediately from Vietnam would bring defeat and be disastrous for world peace. Appealing to the silent majority, Nixon asked for united support "to end the war in a way that we could win the peace." The speech was one of the first to codify the Nixon Doctrine, according to which, "the defense of freedom is everybody's business—not just America's business." After giving the speech, Nixon's approval ratings which had been hovering around 50% shot up to 81% in the nation and 86% in the South.


title: Silent majority

text: In January 1970, "Time" put on their cover an abstract image of a man and a woman representing "Middle America" as a replacement for their annual "Man of the Year" award. Publisher Roy E. Larsen wrote that "the events of 1969 transcended specific individuals. In a time of dissent and 'confrontation', the most striking new factor was the emergence of the Silent Majority as a powerfully assertive force in U.S. society." Larsen described how the silent majority had elected Nixon, had put a man on the moon, and how this demographic felt threatened by "attacks on traditional values".


title: Silent majority

text: The silent majority theme has been a contentious issue amongst journalists since Nixon used the phrase. Some thought Nixon used it as part of the Southern strategy; others claim it was Nixon's way of dismissing the obvious protests going on around the country, and Nixon's attempt to get other Americans not to listen to the protests. Whatever the rationale, Nixon won a landslide victory in


title: Silent majority

text: 1972, taking 49 of 50 states, vindicating his "silent majority". The opposition vote was split successfully, with 80% of George Wallace supporters voting for Nixon rather than George McGovern, unlike Wallace himself.


title: Silent majority

text: Nixon's use of the phrase was part of his strategy to divide Americans and to polarize them into two groups. He used "divide and conquer" tactics to win his political battles, and in 1971 he directed Agnew to speak about "positive polarization" of the electorate. The "silent majority" shared Nixon's anxieties and fears that normalcy was being eroded by changes in society. The other group was composed of intellectuals, cosmopolitans, professionals and liberals, those willing to "live and let live." Both groups saw themselves as the higher patriots. According to Republican pollster Frank Luntz, "silent majority" is but one of many labels which have been applied to the same group of voters. According to him, past labels used by the media include "silent majority" in the 1960s, "forgotten middle class" in the 1970s, "angry white males" in the 1980s, "soccer moms" in the 1990s, and "NASCAR dads" in the 2000s.


title: Silent majority

text: "Silent majority" was the name of a movement (officially called Anticommunist City Committee) active in Milan, Italy, from 1971 to 1974 and headed by the former monarchist partisan Adamo Degli Occhi, that expressed the hostility of the middle class to the 1968 movement. At the beginning it was of conservative tendency; later it moved more and more to the right and in 1974 Degli Occhi was arrested because his relationships with the terroristic movement "Movimento di Azione Rivoluzionaria" (MAR).


title: Silent majority

text: In 1975, in Portugal, then president António de Spínola used the term in confronting the more radical forces of post-revolutionary Portugal.


title: Silent majority

text: The phrase "silent majority" has also been used in the political campaigns of Ronald Reagan during the 1970s and 1980s, the Republican Revolution in the 1994 elections, and the victories of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. The phrase was also used by Quebec Premier Jean Charest during the 2012 Student Strike to refer to what he perceived as the majority of the Quebec voters supporting the tuition hikes.


title: Silent majority

text: The term was used by British Prime Minister David Cameron during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum; Cameron expressed his belief that most Scots opposed independence, while implicitly conceding they may not be as vocal as the people who support it.


title: Silent majority

text: During Donald Trump's presidential campaign, he said at a campaign rally on July 11, 2015, in Phoenix, Arizona, that "the silent majority is back, and we’re going to take our country back". He also referred to the silent majority in subsequent speeches and advertisement, as did the press when describing those who voted for his election as President in 2016. In the midst of the George Floyd protests, he once again invoked the silent majority. CNN analyst Harry Enten described that Trump's support fits better with the term "loud minority", based on the fact that he never hit 50% in any live interview opinion poll throughout his presidency. Jay Caspian Kang argues that some politicians and analysts (Jim Clyburn, Chuck Rocha) feel the unexpected increase in support for Donald Trump among blacks and Latinos in the 2020 election reflects a new silent majority (including some non-whites) reacting against calls for defunding the police and the arrogance of “woke white consultants”.


title: Silent majority

text: In 2019, the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, acknowledged the quiet Australians in his federal election victory speech.


title: Silent majority

text: In the face of rising opposition, the Hong Kong government often claims there is a silent majority that is too afraid to voice their support, and a group called "Silent Majority for Hong Kong" was set up in 2013 to counteract the Occupy Central with Love and Peace movement. In 2019, when the democratic movement became increasingly violent, the Carrie Lam administration and Beijing authorities appealed to the "silent majority" to dissociate themselves from the radical activists and to vote for the pro-government camp in the District Council elections, which were seen as a "de facto" referendum on the protests. However, with a record turnout of over 70%, the pro-democracy camp won 80% of overall seats and controlled 17 out of the 18 District Councils. A commentator of The "New Statesman" deduced that Hong Kong's true silent majority stood on the side of the democratic cause. "Foreign Policy" stated that Beijing had been confident of a huge pro-government victory as a result of a delusion created by its own propaganda.


title: Illusory superiority

text: In the field of social psychology, illusory superiority is a condition of cognitive bias wherein a person overestimates their own qualities and abilities, in relation to the same qualities and abilities of other people. Illusory superiority is one of many positive illusions, relating to the self, that are evident in the study of intelligence, the effective performance of tasks and tests, and the possession of desirable personal characteristics and personality traits. Overestimation of abilities compared to an objective measure is known as the overconfidence effect.


title: Illusory superiority

text: The term "illusory superiority" was first used by the researchers Van Yperen and Buunk, in 1991. The phenomenon is also known as the above-average effect, the superiority bias, the leniency error, the sense of relative superiority, the "primus inter pares" effect, and the Lake Wobegon effect, named after the fictional town where all the children are above average. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a form of illusory superiority shown by people on a task where their level of skill is low.


title: Illusory superiority

text: A vast majority of the literature on illusory superiority originates from studies on participants in the United States. However, research that only investigates the effects in one specific population is severely limited as this may not be a true representation of human psychology. More recent research investigating self-esteem in other countries suggests that illusory superiority depends on culture. Some studies indicate that East Asians tend to underestimate their own abilities in order to improve themselves and get along with others.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Alicke and Govorun proposed the idea that, rather than individuals consciously reviewing and thinking about their own abilities, behaviors and characteristics and comparing them to those of others, it is likely that people instead have what they describe as an "automatic tendency to assimilate positively-evaluated social objects toward ideal trait conceptions". For example, if an individual evaluated themselves as honest, they would be likely to then exaggerate their characteristic towards their perceived ideal position on a scale of honesty. Importantly, Alicke noted that this ideal position is not always the top of the scale; for example, with honesty, someone who is always brutally honest may be regarded as rude—the ideal is a balance, perceived differently by different individuals.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Another explanation for how the better-than-average effect works is egocentrism. This is the idea that an individual places greater importance and significance on their own abilities, characteristics, and behaviors than those of others. Egocentrism is therefore a less overtly self-serving bias. According to egocentrism, individuals will overestimate themselves in relation to others because they believe that they have an advantage that others do not have, as an individual considering their own performance and another's performance will consider their performance to be better, even when they are in fact equal. Kruger (1999) found support for the egocentrism explanation in his research involving participant ratings of their ability on easy and difficult tasks. It was found that individuals were consistent in their ratings of themselves as above the median in the tasks classified as "easy" and below the median in the tasks classified as "difficult", regardless of their actual ability. In this experiment the better-than-average effect was observed when it was suggested to participants that they would be successful, but also a worse-than-average effect was found when it was suggested that participants would be unsuccessful.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Yet another explanation for the better-than-average effect is "focalism", the idea that greater significance is placed on the object that is the focus of attention. Most studies of the better-than-average effect place greater focus on the self when asking participants to make comparisons (the question will often be phrased with the self being presented before the comparison target—"compare yourself to the average person"). According to focalism this means that the individual will place greater significance on their own ability or characteristic than that of the comparison target. This also means that in theory if, in an experiment on the better-than-average effect, the questions were phrased so that the self and other were switched (e.g., "compare the average peer to yourself") the better-than-average effect should be lessened.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Research into focalism has focused primarily on optimistic bias rather than the better-than-average effect. However, two studies found a decreased effect of optimistic bias when participants were asked to compare an average peer to themselves, rather than themselves to an average peer.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Windschitl, Kruger & Simms (2003) have conducted research into focalism, focusing specifically on the better-than-average effect, and found that asking participants to estimate their ability and likelihood of success in a task produced results of decreased estimations when they were asked about others' chances of success rather than their own.


title: Illusory superiority

text: A 2012 "Psychological Bulletin" suggests that illusory superiority, as well as other biases, can be explained by an information-theoretic generative mechanism that assumes observation (a noisy conversion of objective evidence) into subjective estimates (judgment). The study suggests that the underlying cognitive mechanism is similar to the noisy mixing of memories that cause the conservatism bias or overconfidence: re-adjustment of estimates of our own performance after our own performance are adjusted differently than the re-adjustments regarding estimates of others' performances. Estimates of the scores of others are even more conservative (more influenced by the previous expectation) than our estimates of our own performance (more influenced by the new evidence received after giving the test). The difference in the conservative bias of both estimates (conservative estimate of our own performance, and even more conservative estimate of the performance of others) is enough to create illusory superiority.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Since mental noise is a sufficient explanation that is much simpler and more straightforward than any other explanation involving heuristics, behavior, or social interaction, the Occam's razor principle argues in its favor as the underlying generative mechanism (it is the hypothesis which makes the fewest assumptions).


title: Illusory superiority

text: Selective recruitment is the notion that an individual selects their own strengths and the other's weaknesses when making peer comparisons, in order that they appear better on the whole. This theory was first tested by Weinstein (1980); however, this was in an experiment relating to optimistic bias, rather than the better-than-average effect. The study involved participants rating certain behaviors as likely to increase or decrease the chance of a series of life events happening to them. It was found that individuals showed less optimistic bias when they were allowed to see others' answers.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Perloff and Fetzer (1986) suggested that when making peer comparisons on a specific characteristic, an individual chooses a comparison target—the peer to whom he is being compared—with lower abilities. To test this theory, Perloff and Fetzer asked participants to compare themselves to specific comparison targets like a close friend, and found that illusory superiority decreased when they were told to envision a specific person rather than vague constructs like "the average peer". However, these results are not completely reliable and could be affected by the fact that individuals like their close friends more than an "average peer" and may as a result rate their friend as being higher than average, therefore the friend would not be an objective comparison target.


title: Illusory superiority

text: This idea, put forward by Giladi and Klar, suggests that when making comparisons any single member of a group will tend to evaluate themselves to rank above that group's statistical mean performance level or the median performance level of its members. For example, if an individual is asked to assess their own skill at driving compared to the rest of the group, they are likely to rate themself as an above-average driver. Furthermore, the majority of the group is likely to rate themselves as above average. Research has found this effect in many different areas of human performance and has even generalized it beyond individuals' attempts to draw comparisons involving themselves. Findings of this research therefore suggest that rather than individuals evaluating themselves as above average in a self-serving manner, the better-than-average effect is actually due to a general tendency to evaluate any single person or object as better than average.


title: Illusory superiority

text: The better-than-average effect may not have wholly social origins—judgments about inanimate objects suffer similar distortions.


title: Illusory superiority

text: The degree to which people view themselves as more desirable than the average person links to reduced activation in their orbitofrontal cortex and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. This is suggested to link to the role of these areas in processing "cognitive control".


title: Illusory superiority

text: Illusory superiority has been found in individuals' comparisons of themselves with others in a variety of aspects of life, including performance in academic circumstances (such as class performance, exams and overall intelligence), in working environments (for example in job performance), and in social settings (for example in estimating one's popularity, or the extent to which one possesses desirable personality traits, such as honesty or confidence), and in everyday abilities requiring particular skill.


title: Illusory superiority

text: For "illusory" superiority to be demonstrated by social comparison, two logical hurdles have to be overcome. One is the ambiguity of the word "average". It is logically possible for nearly all of the set to be above the mean if the distribution of abilities is highly skewed. For example, the mean number of legs per human being is slightly lower than two because some people have fewer than two and almost none have more. Hence experiments usually compare subjects to the median of the peer group, since by definition it is impossible for a majority to exceed the median.


title: Illusory superiority

text: A further problem in inferring inconsistency is that subjects might interpret the question in different ways, so it is logically possible that a majority of them are, for example, more generous than the rest of the group each on "their own understanding" of generosity. This interpretation is confirmed by experiments which varied the amount of interpretive freedom. As subjects evaluated themselves on a specific, well-defined attribute, illusory superiority remains.


title: Illusory superiority

text: In a survey of faculty at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 68% rated themselves in the top 25% for teaching ability, and 94% rated themselves as above average.


title: Illusory superiority

text: In a similar survey, 87% of Master of Business Administration students at Stanford University rated their academic performance as above the median.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Illusory superiority has also explained phenomena such as the large amount of stock market trading (as each trader thinks they are the best, and most likely to succeed), and the number of lawsuits that go to trial (because, due to illusory superiority, many lawyers have an inflated belief that they will win a case).


title: Illusory superiority

text: In Kruger and Dunning's experiments, participants were given specific tasks (such as solving logic problems, analyzing grammar questions, and determining whether jokes were funny), and were asked to evaluate their performance on these tasks relative to the rest of the group, enabling a direct comparison of their actual and perceived performance.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Results were divided into four groups depending on actual performance and it was found that all four groups evaluated their performance as above average, meaning that the lowest-scoring group (the bottom 25%) showed a very large illusory superiority bias. The researchers attributed this to the fact that the individuals who were worst at performing the tasks were also worst at recognizing skill in those tasks. This was supported by the fact that, given training, the worst subjects improved their estimate of their rank as well as getting better at the tasks. The paper, titled "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments", won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000.


title: Illusory superiority

text: In 2003 Dunning and Joyce Ehrlinger, also of Cornell University, published a study that detailed a shift in people's views of themselves influenced by external cues. Cornell undergraduates were given tests of their knowledge of geography, some intended to positively affect their self-views, others intended to affect them negatively. They were then asked to rate their performance, and those given the positive tests reported significantly better performance than those given the negative.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Daniel Ames and Lara Kammrath extended this work to sensitivity to others, and the subjects' perception of how sensitive they were. Research by Burson, Larrick, and Klayman suggests that the effect is not so obvious and may be due to noise and bias levels.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Dunning, Kruger, and coauthors' latest paper on this subject comes to qualitatively similar conclusions after making some attempt to test alternative explanations.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Svenson (1981) surveyed 161 students in Sweden and the United States, asking them to compare their driving skills and safety to other people's. For driving skills, 93% of the U.S. sample and 69% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%; for safety, 88% of the U.S. and 77% of the Swedish put themselves in the top 50%.


title: Illusory superiority

text: McCormick, Walkey and Green (1986) found similar results in their study, asking 178 participants to evaluate their position on eight different dimensions of driving skills (examples include the "dangerous–safe" dimension and the "considerate–inconsiderate" dimension). Only a small minority rated themselves as below the median, and when all eight dimensions were considered together it was found that almost 80% of participants had evaluated themselves as being an above-average driver.


title: Illusory superiority

text: One commercial survey showed that 36% of drivers believed they were an above-average driver while texting or sending emails compared to other drivers; 44% considered themselves average, and 18% below average.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Illusory superiority was found in a self-report study of health behaviors (Hoorens & Harris, 1998) that asked participants to estimate how often they and their peers carried out healthy and unhealthy behaviors. Participants reported that they carried out healthy behaviors more often than the average peer, and unhealthy behaviors less often. The findings held even for expected future behavior.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Subjects describe themselves in positive terms compared to other people, and this includes describing themselves as less susceptible to bias than other people. This effect is called the "bias blind spot" and has been demonstrated independently.


title: Illusory superiority

text: One of the main effects of illusory superiority in IQ is the "Downing effect". This describes the tendency of people with a below-average IQ to overestimate their IQ, and of people with an above-average IQ to underestimate their IQ (similar trend to the Dunning-Kruger effect). This tendency was first observed by C. L. Downing, who conducted the first cross-cultural studies on perceived intelligence. His studies also showed that the ability to accurately estimate other people's IQs was proportional to one's own IQ (i.e., the lower the IQ, the less capable of accurately appraising other people's IQs). People with high IQs are better overall at appraising other people's IQs, but when asked about the IQs of people with similar IQs as themselves, they are likely to rate them as having higher IQs.


title: Illusory superiority

text: The disparity between actual IQ and perceived IQ has also been noted between genders by British psychologist Adrian Furnham, in whose work there was a suggestion that, on average, men are more likely to overestimate their intelligence by 5 points, while women are more likely to underestimate their IQ by a similar margin.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Illusory superiority has been found in studies comparing memory self-reports, such as Schmidt, Berg & Deelman's research in older adults. This study involved participants aged between 46 and 89 years of age comparing their own memory to that of peers of the same age group, 25-year-olds and their own memory at age 25. This research showed that participants exhibited illusory superiority when comparing themselves to both peers and younger adults, however the researchers asserted that these judgments were only slightly related to age.


title: Illusory superiority

text: In Zuckerman and Jost's study, participants were given detailed questionnaires about their friendships and asked to assess their own popularity. Using social network analysis, they were able to show that participants generally had exaggerated perceptions of their own popularity, especially in comparison to their own friends.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Despite the fact that most people in the study believed that they had more friends than their friends, a 1991 study by sociologist Scott L. Feld on the friendship paradox shows that on average, due to sampling bias, most people have fewer friends than their friends have.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Researchers have also found illusory superiority in relationship satisfaction. For example, one study found that participants perceived their own relationships as better than others' relationships on average, but thought that the majority of people were happy with their relationships. It also found evidence that the higher the participants rated their own relationship happiness, the more superior they believed their relationship was—illusory superiority also increased their own relationship satisfaction. This effect was pronounced in men, whose satisfaction was especially related to the perception that one's own relationship was superior as well as to the assumption that few others were unhappy in their relationships. On the other hand, women's satisfaction was particularly related to the assumption that most people were happy with their relationship. One study found that participants became defensive when their spouse or partner were perceived by others to be more successful in any aspect of their life, and had the tendency to exaggerate their success and understate their spouse or partner's success.


title: Illusory superiority

text: One of the first studies that found illusory superiority was carried out in the United States by the College Board in 1976. A survey was attached to the SAT exams (taken by one million students annually), asking the students to rate themselves relative to the median of the sample (rather than the average peer) on a number of vague positive characteristics. In ratings of leadership, 70% of the students put themselves above the median. In ability to get on well with others, 85% put themselves above the median; 25% rated themselves in the top 1%.


title: Illusory superiority

text: A 2002 study on illusory superiority in social settings, with participants comparing themselves to friends and other peers on positive characteristics (such as punctuality and sensitivity) and negative characteristics (such as naivety or inconsistency). This study found that participants rated themselves more favorably than their friends, but rated their friends more favorably than other peers (but there were several moderating factors).


title: Illusory superiority

text: Research by Perloff and Fetzer, Brown, and Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner also found friends being rated higher than other peers. Tajfel and Turner attributed this to an "ingroup bias" and suggested that this was motivated by the individual's desire for a "positive social identity".


title: Illusory superiority

text: While illusory superiority has been found to be somewhat self-serving, this does not mean that it will predictably occur—it is not constant. The strength of the effect is moderated by many factors, the main examples of which have been summarized by Alicke and Govorun (2005).


title: Illusory superiority

text: This is a phenomenon that Alicke and Govorun have described as "the nature of the judgement dimension" and refers to how subjective (abstract) or objective (concrete) the ability or characteristic being evaluated is. Research by Sedikides & Strube (1997) has found that people are more self-serving (the effect of illusory superiority is stronger) when the event in question is more open to interpretation, for example social constructs such as popularity and attractiveness are more interpretable than characteristics such as intelligence and physical ability. This has been partly attributed also to the need for a believable self-view.


title: Illusory superiority

text: The idea that ambiguity moderates illusory superiority has empirical research support from a study involving two conditions: in one, participants were given criteria for assessing a trait as ambiguous or unambiguous, and in the other participants were free to assess the traits according to their own criteria. It was found that the effect of illusory superiority was greater in the condition where participants were free to assess the traits.


title: Illusory superiority

text: The effects of illusory superiority have also been found to be strongest when people rate themselves on abilities at which they are totally incompetent. These subjects have the greatest disparity between their actual performance (at the low end of the distribution) and their self-rating (placing themselves above average). This Dunning–Kruger effect is interpreted as a lack of metacognitive ability to recognize their own incompetence.


title: Illusory superiority

text: The method used in research into illusory superiority has been found to have an implication on the strength of the effect found. Most studies into illusory superiority involve a comparison between an individual and an average peer, of which there are two methods: direct comparison and indirect comparison. A direct comparison—which is more commonly used—involves the participant rating themselves and the average peer on the same scale, from "below average" to "above average" and results in participants being far more self-serving. Researchers have suggested that this occurs due to the closer comparison between the individual and the average peer, however use of this method means that it is impossible to know whether a participant has overestimated themselves, underestimated the average peer, or both.


title: Illusory superiority

text: The indirect method of comparison involves participants rating themselves and the average peer on separate scales and the illusory superiority effect is found by taking the average peer score away from the individual's score (with a higher score indicating a greater effect). While the indirect comparison method is used less often it is more informative in terms of whether participants have overestimated themselves or underestimated the average peer, and can therefore provide more information about the nature of illusory superiority.


title: Illusory superiority

text: The nature of the comparison target is one of the most fundamental moderating factors of the effect of illusory superiority, and there are two main issues relating to the comparison target that need to be considered.


title: Illusory superiority

text: First, research into illusory superiority is distinct in terms of the comparison target because an individual compares themselves with a hypothetical average peer rather than a tangible person. Alicke et al. (1995) found that the effect of illusory superiority was still present but was significantly reduced when participants compared themselves with real people (also participants in the experiment, who were seated in the same room), as opposed to when participants compared themselves with an average peer. This suggests that research into illusory superiority may itself be biasing results and finding a greater effect than would actually occur in real life.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Further research into the differences between comparison targets involved four conditions where participants were at varying proximity to an interview with the comparison target: watching live in the same room; watching on tape; reading a written transcript; or making self-other comparisons with an average peer. It was found that when the participant was further removed from the interview situation (in the tape observation and transcript conditions) the effect of illusory superiority was found to be greater. Researchers asserted that these findings suggest that the effect of illusory superiority is reduced by two main factors—individuation of the target and live contact with the target.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Second, Alicke et al.'s (1995) studies investigated whether the negative connotations to the word "average" may have an effect on the extent to which individuals exhibit illusory superiority, namely whether the use of the word "average" increases illusory superiority. Participants were asked to evaluate themselves, the average peer and a person whom they had sat next to in the previous experiment, on various dimensions. It was found that they placed themselves highest, followed by the real person, followed by the average peer, however the average peer was consistently placed above the mean point on the scale, suggesting that the word "average" did not have a negative effect on the participant's view of the average peer.


title: Illusory superiority

text: An important moderating factor of the effect of illusory superiority is the extent to which an individual believes they are able to control and change their position on the dimension concerned. According to Alicke & Govorun positive characteristics that an individual believes are within their control are more self-serving, and negative characteristics that are seen as uncontrollable are less detrimental to self-enhancement. This theory was supported by Alicke's (1985) research, which found that individuals rated themselves as higher than an average peer on positive controllable traits and lower than an average peer on negative uncontrollable traits. The idea, suggested by these findings, that individuals believe that they are responsible for their success and some other factor is responsible for their failure is known as the self-serving bias.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Personality characteristics vary widely between people and have been found to moderate the effects of illusory superiority, one of the main examples of this is self-esteem. Brown (1986) found that in self-evaluations of positive characteristics participants with higher self-esteem showed greater illusory superiority bias than participants with lower self-esteem. Additionally, another study found that participants pre-classified as having high self-esteem tended to interpret ambiguous traits in a self-serving way, whereas participants pre-classified as having low self-esteem did not do this.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Psychology has traditionally assumed that generally accurate self-perceptions are essential to good mental health. This was challenged by a 1988 paper by Taylor and Brown, who argued that mentally healthy individuals typically manifest three cognitive illusions—illusory superiority, illusion of control, and optimism bias. This idea rapidly became very influential, with some authorities concluding that it would be therapeutic to deliberately induce these biases. Since then, further research has both undermined that conclusion and offered new evidence associating illusory superiority with negative effects on the individual.


title: Illusory superiority

text: One line of argument was that in the Taylor and Brown paper, the classification of people as mentally healthy or unhealthy was based on self-reports rather than objective criteria. People prone to self-enhancement would exaggerate how well-adjusted they are. One study claimed that "mentally normal" groups were contaminated by "defensive deniers", who are the most subject to positive illusions. A longitudinal study found that self-enhancement biases were associated with poor social skills and psychological maladjustment. In a separate experiment where videotaped conversations between men and women were rated by independent observers, self-enhancing individuals were more likely to show socially problematic behaviors such as hostility or irritability. A 2007 study found that self-enhancement biases were associated with psychological benefits (such as subjective well-being) but also inter- and intra-personal costs (such as anti-social behavior).


title: Illusory superiority

text: In contrast to what is commonly believed, research has found that better-than-average effects are not universal. In fact, much recent research has found the opposite effect in many tasks, especially if they were more difficult.


title: Illusory superiority

text: Illusory superiority's relationship with self-esteem is uncertain. The theory that those with high self-esteem maintain this high level by rating themselves highly is not without merit—studies involving non-depressed college students found that they thought they had more control over positive outcomes compared to their peers, even when controlling for performance. Non-depressed students also actively rate peers below themselves as opposed to rating themselves higher. Students were able to recall a great deal more negative personality traits about others than about themselves.


title: Illusory superiority

text: In these studies there was no distinction made between people with legitimate and illegitimate high self-esteem, as other studies have found that absence of positive illusions mainly coexist with high self-esteem and that determined individuals bent on growth and learning are less prone to these illusions. Thus it may be that while illusory superiority is associated with undeserved high self-esteem, people with legitimate high self-esteem do not necessarily exhibit it.


title: Illusory superiority

text: The cognitive bias of illusory superiority has been known throughout history and identified by intellectuals. A sampling of their comments includes:


title: 2016–17 Manchester City F.C. season

text: The 2016–17 season was Manchester City's 115th season of competitive football, 88th season in the top division of English football and 20th season in the Premier League since the league was first created with City as one of the original 22 founder-members. They competed in all three domestic competitions, as well as the UEFA Champions League for the sixth year in a row.


title: 2016–17 Manchester City F.C. season

text: In conjunction with the recruitment of Pep Guardiola, the manager whom City's executives had sought to hire since they joined the club four years previously and the man synonymous with the style of football they wanted the club to espouse, Manchester City announced a series of adjustments to the club's "brand" prior to the start of the season.


title: 2016–17 Manchester City F.C. season

text: On 15 October 2015, the club announced that they intended to enter into a consultation with their fans over the designing of a new badge to replace the design that had been brought in 1997 and which had largely been unpopular since. The result of the online-based consultation was a design bearing many of the hallmarks of the crest replaced in 1997, plus some elements of the style established by the other club badges of fellow City Football Group teams Melbourne City FC and New York City FC. While many praised the logo for its simplicity and similarity to the beloved previous design, it was criticised from other corners for its slightly amateurish appearance, its removal of the words "Football Club" and for its failure to more closely replicate the earlier badge.


title: 2016–17 Manchester City F.C. season

text: On 30 June 2016, the club unexpectedly announced the renaming of their Twitter accounts and website. Replacing the old "branding" of MCFC (the initials of the club), both social media outlets were rechristened "ManCity". While the move was popular among many, especially the club's more recent foreign fans for whom the styling was already their preferred abbreviation of the club's name, the change provoked another mixed reaction from the Manchester-based core supporter base, with many criticising the decision to use a wording often used by the club's rivals, as well as highlighting the decision to again remove the "Football Club" wording.


title: 2016–17 Manchester City F.C. season

text: On 20 July 2016, Manchester City began their pre-season with a 0–1 defeat against Bayern Munich. Due to bad weather during the International Champions Cup, the derby against Manchester United was cancelled, and City went on to play Borussia Dortmund in their next cup match, which they would go on to win 6–5 on penalties after drawing 1–1 at the end of regular time. A match was played on 7 August against Arsenal in the 2016 Supermatchen, which ended 3–2 to Arsenal. To replace the game against Manchester United, which was cancelled, City arranged a friendly against St Johnstone, which was played behind closed doors.


title: 2016–17 Manchester City F.C. season

text: As a Premier League club, Manchester City entered the competition in the third round, drawing West Ham United away from home.


title: 2016–17 Manchester City F.C. season

text: As a European club, Manchester City entered the competition in the third round, drawing Swansea City away from home.


title: 2016–17 Manchester City F.C. season

text: In the first season under the reign of Pep Guardiola, hopes were high for Manchester City as they progressed to the knock-out phase after finishing second in the group that featured Guardiola's former team, Barcelona. City lost their away match to Barça 0–4, but then rebounded to win 3–1 at home. In the round of 16 City were drawn with Monaco and were expected to progress to the quarterfinals. The Blues were trailing 1–2 and 2–3 in their home match before scoring three unanswered goals and winning 5–3. In the away game, the Cityzens were down 0–2 when Leroy Sané scored and seemingly brought the ticket to the quarterfinals to Man City, but Tiémoué Bakayoko's late goal meant that Monaco progressed further and City were eliminated.


title: 2016–17 Manchester City F.C. season

text: The draw for the Champions League play-off round took place on 5 August 2016. Manchester City were a seeded team in the league route. They were drawn against Steaua București of Romania.


title: 2016–17 Manchester City F.C. season

text: The group stage draw was made on 25 August 2016 in Monaco. Manchester City were drawn with Barcelona (pot 1), Borussia Mönchengladbach (pot 3), and Celtic (pot 4).


title: 2016–17 Manchester City F.C. season

text: "Awarded to the player that receives the most votes in a poll conducted each month on the club's official website"


title: Social media use in politics

text: Social media use in politics refers to the use of online social media platforms in political processes and activities. Political processes and activities include all activities that pertain to the governance of a country or area. This includes oh no political organization, global politics, political corruption, political parties, and political values.


title: Social media use in politics

text: The internet has created channels of communication that play a key role in circulating news, and social media has the power to change not just the message, but the dynamics of political corruption, values, and the dynamics of conflict in politics. Through the use of social media in election processes, global conflict, and extreme politics, diplomacy around the world has become less private and susceptive to the public perception.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Social media have been championed as allowing anyone with an Internet connection to become a content creator and empowering their users. The idea of "new media populism" encompasses how citizens can include disenfranchised citizens, and allow the public to have an engaged and active role in political discourse. New media, including social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, can enhance people's access to political information.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Social media platforms and the internet have facilitated the dissemination of political information that counters mainstream media tactics that are often centralized and top-down, and include high barriers to entry. Writer Howard Rheingold characterized the community created on social networking sites:"The political significance of computer mediated communication lies in its capacity to challenge the existing political hierarchy's monopoly on powerful communications media, and perhaps thus revitalize citizen-based democracy."Scholar Derrick de Kerckhove described the new technology in media: "In a networked society, the real powershift is from the producer to the consumer, and there is a redistribution of controls and power. On the Web, Karl Marx's dream has been realized: the tools and the means of production are in the hands of the workers."The role of social media in democratizing media participation, which proponents herald as ushering in a new era of participatory democracy, with all users able to contribute news and comments, may fall short of the ideals. International survey data suggest online media audience members are largely passive consumers, while content creation is dominated by a small number of social users who post comments and write new content. Others argue that the effect of social media will vary from one country to another, with domestic political structures playing a greater role than social media in determining how citizens express opinions about stories of current affairs involving the state.


title: Social media use in politics

text: In June 2020, users of the Social Media platform TikTok organised a movement to prank a Trump Rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma by buying tickets and not attending so that the rally appeared empty.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Social media platforms are increasingly used for political news and information by adults in the United States, especially when it comes to election time. A study by Pew Research conducted in November 2019, found that one-in-five US adults get their political news primarily through social media. 18% of adults use social media to get their political and election news. In small research conducted by McKeever et al in 2022, they found that 269 out of the 510 United States participants had noted that they got most of their information about gun violence from social media sources.


title: Social media use in politics

text: The Pew Research Center further found that out of these United States Adults relying on social media for this information, 48% of them are from ages 18–29.


title: Social media use in politics

text: In addition, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, lead the social media platforms in which the majority of the users use the platforms to acquire news information. Of all United States adults, 67% use the platform with 44% who use the platform to get news.


title: Social media use in politics

text: According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report in 2013, the percentage of online news users who blog about news issues ranges from 1–5%. Greater percentages use social media to comment on news, with participation ranging from 8% in Germany to 38% in Brazil. But online news users are most likely to just talk about online news with friends offline or use social media to share stories without creating content.


title: Social media use in politics

text: The rapid propagation of information on social media, spread by word of mouth, can impact the perception of political figures quickly with information that may or may not be true. When political information is propagated in this manner on purpose, the spread of information on social media for political means can benefit campaigns. On the other hand, the word-of-mouth propagation of negative information concerning a political figure can be damaging. For example, the use of the social media platform Twitter by United States congressman Anthony Weiner to send inappropriate messages played a role in his resignation.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Social media, especially news that is spread through social media sites, plays into the idea of the attention economy. In which content that attracts more attention will be seen, shared, and disseminated far more than news content that does not gather as much traction from the public. Tim Wu from Columbia Law School coins the attention economy as "the resale of human attention."


title: Social media use in politics

text: A communication platform such as social media is persuasive, and often works to change or influence opinions when it comes to political views because of the abundance of ideas, thoughts, and opinions circulating through the social media platform. It is found that news use leads to political persuasion, therefore the more that people use social media platforms for news sources, the more their political opinions will be affected. Despite that, people are expressing less trust in their government and others due to media use- therefore social media directly affects trust in media use. It is proven that while reading newspapers there is an increase in social trust where on the contrary watching the news on television weakened trust in others and news sources. Social media, or more specifically news media- plays an important role in democratic societies because they allow for participation among citizens.Therefore, when it comes to healthy democratic networks, it is crucial that that news remains true so it doesn't affect citizens' levels of trust. A certain amount of trust is necessary for a healthy and well functioning democratic system.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Younger generations are becoming more involved in politics due to the increase of political news posted on various types of social media. Due to the heavier use of social media among younger generations, they are exposed to politics more frequently, and in a way that is integrated into their online social lives. While informing younger generations of political news is important, there are many biases within the realms of social media. In May 2016, former Facebook Trending News curator Benjamin Fearnow revealed his job was to "massage the algorithm," but dismissed any "intentional, outright bias" by either human or automated efforts within the company. Fearnow was fired by Facebook after being caught leaking several internal company debates about Black Lives Matter and presidential candidate Donald Trump.


title: Social media use in politics

text: A key debate centers on whether or not social media is a public good based on the premises of non-rival and non-excludable consumption. Social media can be considered an impure public good as it can be excludable given the rights of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to remove content, disable accounts, and filter information based on algorithms and community standards.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Arguments for platforms such as Google in being treated as a public utility and public service provider include statements from Benjamin Barber in "The Nation"


title: Social media use in politics

text: "For new media to be potential equalizers, they must be treated as public utilities, recognizing that spectrum abundance (the excuse for privatization) does not prevent monopoly ownership of hardware and software platforms and hence cannot guarantee equal civic, educational, and cultural access to citizens."Similarly, Zeynep Tufekci argues online services are natural monopolies that underwrite the "corporatization of social commons" and the "privatization of our publics."


title: Social media use in politics

text: One argument that displays the nature of social media as an impure public good is the fact that the control over content remains in the hands of a few large media networks, Google and Facebook, for example. Google and Facebook have the power to shape the environment under personal and commercial goals that promotes profitability, as opposed to promoting citizen voice and public deliberation.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Proponents and aims for regulation of social media are growing due to economic concerns of monopolies of the platforms, to issues of privacy, censorship, network neutrality and information storage. The discussion of regulation is complicated due to the issue how Facebook, and Google are increasingly becoming a service, information pipeline, and content provider, and thus centers on how the government would regulate both the platform as a service and information provider. Thus, other proponents advocate for "algorithmic neutrality", or the aim for search engines on social media platforms to rank data without human intervention.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Opponents of regulation of social media platforms argue that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter do not resemble traditional public utilities, and regulation would harm consumer welfare as public utility regulation can hinder innovation and competition. Second, as the First Amendment values are criticized on social media platforms, the media providers should retain the power to how the platform is configured.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Social media has been criticized as being detrimental to democracy. According to Ronald Deibert, "The world of social media is more conducive to extreme, emotionally charged, and divisive types of content than it is to calm, principled considerations of competing or complex narratives". On the contrary, Ethan Zuckerman says that social media presents the opportunity to inform more people, amplify voices, and allow for an array of diverse voices to speak. Mari K. Eder points to failures of the Fourth Estate that have allowed outrage to be disguised as news, contributing to citizen apathy when confronting falsehoods and further distrust in democratic institutions.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Social media has allowed politicians to subvert typical media outlets by engaging with the general public directly. Donald Trump utilised this when he lost the 2020 presidential election by claiming the election to be fraudulent and therefore creating the need for a re-election. The consequences of Trump's online actions were displayed when, on January 6, the U.S. Capitol was attacked by supporters of the former president.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Being a popular presence on social media also boosts a politician's likelihood of coming to power take Boris Johnson in the 2019 bid to replace Theresa May as Prime Minister, Johnson had more than half a million page 'liking' his page (substantially more than the other candidates) which meant that when he released his launch video it gained more than 130,000 views which could have been a prominent factor in him eventually winning power.


title: Social media use in politics

text: A study conducted by Sounman Hong found that in the case of politicians utilising social media and whether its use would increase on their individual weighing up on the consequences and if they would be largely positive or negative found that in the case of backbenchers, 'underdogs' and opposition it was likely to increase in order to gain recognition and support from the public eye where they otherwise might go unnoticed.


title: Social media use in politics

text: During the peak of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the Internet and social media played a huge role in facilitating information. At that time, Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt and head the regime for almost 30 years. Mubarak was so threatened by the immense power that the Internet and social media gave the people that the government successfully shut down the Internet, using the Ramses Exchange, for a period of time in February 2011.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Egyptians used Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as a means to communicate and organize demonstrations and rallies to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak. Statistics show that during this time the rate of Tweets from Egypt increased from 2,300 to 230,000 per day and the top 23 protest videos had approximately 5.5 million views.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Though fake news can generate some utility for consumers, in terms of confirming far-right beliefs and spreading propaganda in favor of a presidential candidate, it also imposes private and social costs. For example, one social cost to consumer is the spread of disinformation which can make it harder for consumers to seek out the truth and, in the case of the 2016 Election, for consumers to choose an electoral candidate. Summarized by a Congressional Research Service Study in 2017,"Cyber tools were also used [by Russia] to create psychological effects in the American population. The likely collateral effects of these activities include compromising the fidelity of information, sowing discord and doubt in the American public about the validity of intelligence community reports, and prompting questions about the democratic process itself." The marginal social cost of fake news is exponential, as the first article is shared it can affect a small number of people, but as the article is circulated more throughout Facebook, the negative externality multiplies. As a result, the quantity demanded of news can shift up around election season as consumers seek to find correct news, however the quantity demanded can also shift down as people have a lower trust in mainstream media. In the American public, a Gallup poll in 2016 found "Americans' trust in the mass media 'to report the news fully, accurately and fairly' was, at 32%, the lowest in the organization's polling history." In addition, trust in mainstream media is lower in Republican and far-right political viewers at 14%. About 72% of American adults claim that social media firms excessively control and influence the politics today, as per the June 16–22 survey conducted by Pew Research Center. Only 21% believe that the power held by these social media firms over today's politics is of the right amount, while 6% believe it is not enough.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Algorithms can facilitate the rapid spread of disinformation through social media channels. Algorithms use users' past behavior and engagement activity to provide them with tailored content that aligns with their interests and beliefs. Algorithms commonly create echo chambers and sow radicalism and extremist thinking in these online spaces.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Algorithms promote social media posts with high 'engagement,' meaning posts that received a lot of 'likes' or 'comments'/'replies'. For better or for worse, engagement and controversy go hand-in-hand. Controversy attracts attention as it evokes an emotional response, however "Benford's Law" of controversy states that "passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available". This means that the less grounded in facts a political tweet is, the more engagement it is likely to receive, therefore the likelihood of spreading disinformation is high. Twitter has become a battleground for political debate. Psychologist, Jordan Peterson, spoke of Twitter's radicalising effect in an interview conducted by GQ. He explained that for any given tweet that appears on one's 'feed,' the tweet shall have been seen by a far greater number of people than is reflected by its likes and comments. Therefore, who are the people who comment on a tweet? The people who comment shall be those who have the strongest views on the matter, the people who want their opinion to be heard. Peterson claims that this creates an environment in which the opinions that the average user sees on twitter do not reflect the views of a random sample of the population. The opinions most commonly seen on twitter tend to be those of people at each extreme end of the political ideology spectrum, hence the 'radicalising effect'.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Political advertisements—for example, encouraging people to vote for or against a particular candidate, or to take a position on a particular issue—have often been placed on social media. On 22 November 2019, Twitter said it would no longer facilitate political advertising anywhere in the world. Due to the nature of Social media bringing different information to different people based on their interests, advertising methods such as "Microtargeting" and "Black ads" have become prominent on social media and allow advertising to be much more effective for the same price, relative to traditional adverts such as those on cable TV.


title: Social media use in politics

text: When it comes to political referendums, individuals often gather on social media at the grassroots level to campaign for change. This is particularly effective where it comes to feminist political issues, as studies have proven that women are more likely to tweet about policy problems and do so in a way that is more aggressive than their male counter-parts. Like-minded individuals can collectively work together to influence social change and utilise social media as a tool for social justice. An example of this is in the referendum to appeal Ireland's eighth amendment. Civil society organisations, such as TogetherForYes, utilised Twitter as a tool to bring abortion law into the public and make the harms of the eighth amendment visible and accessible. The positive outcome of the referendum (in the amendments repeal) can be equated to the efforts of individuals and advocates coming together at the grassroots level to make the vote visible, as social media goes beyond the local level to create a widespread global political impact, making the issue of strict abortion laws a global one, rather than one just confined to Ireland. The strength in a political grassroots campaign on social media is the increased mobilisation of participants. Due to the fact that social media platforms are largely accessible, a political platform can be provided to the voices of those traditionally silenced in the political sphere or in traditional media.


title: Social media use in politics

text: The 2016 United States Presidential Election was an example in which social media was used by the state actor Russia to influence public opinion. Tactics such as propaganda, trolling, and bots were used to leak fake news stories that included an "FBI agent had been killed after leaking Clinton's emails" and "Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump." Studies have found that pro-Trump news was as many as four-time more than pro-Clinton fake news, and a third of the pro-Trump tweets were generated by bots.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Social media has also provided the means for large amounts of data to be collected on social media users – allowing analysis and predictions to be made on what information and advertising the user is most likely to be susceptible to. This was highlighted in 2018 when the Cambridge Analytica – Facebook scandal emerged. Data and predictions from the company were used to influence voters in the 2016 Brexit/Leave campaign and also the 2016 US election Trump Campaign.


title: Social media use in politics

text: This scandal first appeared in the news in 2016 following both the UK's Brexit referendum results and the US' presidential election result but was an on-going operation by Cambridge Analytica with the permission of Facebook using Aleksandr Kogan's app "This is your Digital Life". However, the methods were exposed on 27 September 2016 during a presentation by Alexander Nix named "The Power of Big Data and Psychographics". Nix was the chief executive officer of market-research at Cambridge Analytica. After founding the company in 2013 he was then suspended on 20 March 2018 following the release of a video in which he admitted to working directly with Donald Trump to gather data on the US electorate. In his 2016 presentation, Nix highlights his contribution the 2016 Ted Cruz campaign and how taking the focus away from demographics and geographics for the targeted ads and instead using psychographics in order to target personality traits and get a better understanding of voter demands is a more effective method of gaining votes. In 2016, one of Nix's business associates, Steve Bannon, left the company to take over the campaign of Donald Trump and as a result of the video leak which lost Nix his job it is largely believed he had direct influence too. As well as this, Cambridge Analytica staff were also heavily involved in the Vote-Leave campaign for the 2016 Brexit referendum. As a result of an organisation specialised in targeted ads being involved in two populist campaigns that produced shock results, many point out as a potential threat to democracy.


title: Social media use in politics

text: But this is not the only example of potential election interference using social media. November 1, 2015, Rodrigo Duterte was announced as president of Philippines after being 'the first person to make the full use of the power of social media'. Facebook had made an astonishing rise since the previous election and Duterte saw this as an opportunity to get social media influencers to promote his party and create viral content, further showing the power social media can have over democracy.


title: Social media use in politics

text: On 18 May 2017, "Time" had reported that the US Congress was investigating CA in connection with Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. The report alleges that CA may have coordinated the spread of Russian propaganda using its microtargetting capabilities. In 2018, following disclosures that the company had improperly used the personal information of over 50 million Facebook users while working on Trump's presidential campaign, "The Times of Israel" reported that the company had used what Nix had called "intelligence gathering" from British and Israeli companies as part of their efforts to influence the election results in Trump's favor.


title: Social media use in politics

text: This was the work of one company and regulation may be able to prevent this in the future, but social media is now a medium that makes this kind of interference possible.


title: Social media use in politics

text: In October 2020, Twitter announced its new policy that candidates will be forbidden to claim victory until their election win has been credibly projected by news outlets or officially certified.


title: Social media use in politics

text: Social media has a profound effect on elections. Oftentimes, social media compounds with the mass media networks such as cable television. For many individuals, cable television serves as the basis and first contact for where many get their information and sources. Cable television also has commentary that creates partisanship and builds on to people's predispositions to certain parties. Social media takes mass media's messages and oftentimes amplifies and reinforces such messages and perpetuates partisan divides. In an article by the Journal of Communication, they concluded that social media does not have a strong effect on people's views or votes, but social media does not also have a minimal effect on their views. Instead, social media creates a bandwagon effect when a candidate in an election commits an error or a great success, then users on social media will amplify the effect of such failure or success greatly.


title: Social media use in politics

text: The Pew Research Center finds that nearly one fourth of Americans learn something about the candidates through an internet source such as Facebook. Nearly a fifth of America uses social media with two thirds of those Americans being youth ages of 18–29. The youth's presence on social media often inspires rallies and creates movements. For instance, in the 2008 presidential election, a Facebook group of 62,000 members was created that sponsored the election of President Obama and within days universities across the countries held rallies in the thousands. Rallies and movements such as these are often coined the "Facebook Effect". However, social media can often have the opposite effect and take a toll on many users. The Pew Research Center in a poll found that nearly 55 percent of social media users in the US indicate that they are "worn out" by the amount of political posts on social media. With the rise of technology and social media continuing, that number increased by nearly 16 percent since the 2016 presidential election. Nearly 70 percent of individuals say that talking about politics on social media with people on the opposite side is often "stressful and frustrating" compared to 56 percent in 2016. Consequently, the number of people who find these discussions as "interesting and informative" decreased from 35% to 26% since 2016.


title: Social media use in politics

text: In terms of social media's effect on the youth vote, it is quite substantial. In the 2018 elections, nearly 31 percent of the youth voted compared to just 21 percent in 2014. Social media use among the youth continue to grow as around 90 percent of the youth use at least one social media platform. Of the 90 percent, 47 percent received information about the 2018 elections via a social media platform. The messages shared on the social media platform often include messages to register to vote and actually carrying out their vote; this is in contrast to receiving the message from the candidate's campaign itself. Subsequently, of the first time youth voters in the 2018 election, 68 percent relied on social media to get their information about voting. This is in comparison to the traditional methods of being notified to vote of just 23 percent first time voters. Furthermore, just 22 percent of youth who did not hear about an election via social media or traditional means were very likely to vote; however, 54 percent of youth who found out about the election via social media or traditional ways were very likely to vote. However, the youth are becoming distrustful of the content they read on social media as Forbes notes that there has been a decline in public trust due to many political groups and foreign nations creating fake accounts to spread a great amount of misinformation with the aim of dividing the country.