Assuming that we'll come to our senses, I think well be looking back at social media, in it's current form, the same way we now look at the Victorians using opium as cough medicine. It works, but holy shit are you doing it wrong.
Media (social or otherwise) is a force multiplier. Ultimately it is the sensory, feedback, and control mechanism for a social system. And yes, if you change the informational behaviour of a system you fundamentally change that system's behaviour, there are still other factors at play.
Corruption, inequality, biases (themselves often reinforced through media, yes), environment, and various other endogenous and exogenous factors also come in to play. I'd also call in other informational elements, including widespread surveillance systems and AI, which operate in at least part outside the scope of social media.
That social media exacerbates many of our present problems I'd agree to. That it's fundamental to all of them, not so much.
I am not convinced that even if we had less corruption, inequality, environmental issues that we wouldnt still see the fragmentation of society and the rise of populism that we see today.
Social media algorithms explicitly optimise for isolationism and extremism, cultivating rage stemming from small disagreements, which are simply a fact of life.
The only way to solve this is if there were no disagreements or differing opinions to amplify, which is sadly impossible.
I'd say 'social problems', but otherwise entirely true.
One of the strangest things I find is that people will spend serious money to buy a house somewhere they don't have to be exposed to the great unwashed yet will happily expose their brains to the worst of the worst via social media.
I don’t disagree that social media has played a massive role in changing the world in a negative way. This is a very far reaching claim though and one that kinda misses the forest for the trees. The problem is that fundamentally capitalism demands that companies find more ways to siphon more money from customers every quarter or they fail.
Social media is a perfect storm for the elites in this system. It’s a CIA wet dream. It’s literally a globalized and hyper personalized propaganda distribution platform. This is the inevitable outcome of capitalism and human behavior. Meta’s whole purpose is to create the most optimized pipeline for accepting money from 3rd parties in exchange for convincing as many people as possible of what they want those people to believe.
Social media is evil but it’s also the natural course of what happens with current technology and the incentives of capitalism.
Wall Street makes those demands. Those demands are backed up by court cases and precedent. Nothing about this is synonymous with "capitalism."
> It’s a CIA wet dream.
And they spend a significant amount of money. Is this "capitalism" still? Or are there more specific terms that would apply more directly to this arrangement?
> Social media is evil
The US is the largest manufacturer and seller of weapons in the world.
You have one thing on your mind - "social media bad" - and it is poisoning your ability to see the complexity in the world. There is rarely a single cause for anything, and there is never a single cause for everything.
"[G]lobal" is doing a lot of work in this sentence if I'm reading it as intended; this seems to exclude international conflict and intra-national strife (which are very big issues).
