I am about up to my neck now of people scapegoating social media as a concept, to excuse themselves from their shitty behavior. Because I sincerely doubt that malicious intent, misinformation and this overwhelming level of ‘toxicity’ was the core design of every social media platform in their humble beginnings.
I have been online long enough to know, that from BBS Boards to IRC Servers to Yahoo/AOL Chat Rooms to MySpace to Facebook that people who have registered onto those places, have always taken their collective dumps in them. And never owing to them so it must all be because these places just exist, right?
Wrong.
The part you’re missing in this discussion is the way that modern social media systems are built to algorithmically encourage “engagement”, which almost always results in extreme and polarising opinions being pushed by the platforms. There are always shitty people in online spaces but those shitty people are disproportionately more visible in most social media because of the this.
That is the way things are now and have been for the bitter part of the past 10 some odd years. Because people’s idiotic behavior has combed it that way. Again, it routes back to people’s behavior that fuels said algorithm.
but also it’s the algorithm itself being tuned that way
by people
So users and executives do net get split up?