[CliffFletcher]

Twitter has badly undermined journalism. The incentive to post an immediate hot take rather than take the time to gather facts from several sources. The incentive for a journalist to develop a personal following, and for that following to be highly partisan. The incentive to seek likes and retweets with snarky bon mots. The fact that the active user base of twitter isn’t anything close to being representative of the population at large, but journalists behave as though it is. Look at how astonished so many pundits were at Biden winning the Democratic primary. Nobody in their social media universe supported the guy.

The people tasked with informing us and mediating our dialogue live in a world different from 90 per cent of us. Heck, even those of us posting here or on Facebook or reddit live in a different world. Only a fraction of the population posts about contentious subjects on social media at all, and we are far from representative of the general population - angrier, younger, more partisan.

Social media distorts our perception of norms by fostering echo chambers and rewarding partisanship and extreme opinions. This has been validated by data and studies. Saying no, my social media sources and my tribe are different, is just a delusion. You’re not immune to the effects that the creators of these tools have spent billions and billions of dollars developing and perfecting.