Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
The whole business model of social media is a polarization machine. The algorithms that dredge up contentious and radical content, likes/dislikes, sharing and retweets - all deliberately designed to make us angry, anxious, and divided.
If you had assigned a team of psychologists and sociologists in 1980 a challenge to devise a machine to undermine social trust and civility, they wouldn’t possibly have dreamt up anything so effective as facebook, twitter, or reddit.
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Absolutely, there is now doubt that these platforms need to be deeply regulated for hate speech and non-factual information. Western societies will continue to tear themselves apart if they are not.
If anyone hasn't watched "The Social Dilemma" it goes into how the social media engines are designed to be addictive and can very deeply misinform from a host of former social media developers and employees. Another good one is "Agents of Chaos" which deep dives into the entire Russian-run social media disinformation operation and how exactly they used the provided corporate tools available to them to cause the deep social problems there are today.
Government stability aside, social media has caused all sorts of mental health issues among children that have grown up with it... like the huge increase in the number of teenage girls who have even more body image issues, self-esteem problems, and suicidal thoughts nowadays because of social media, but one problem at a time. Lets fix the whole country tearing itself apart thing first cuz you can't fix one without the other.