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.
Social media platforms and the services you cite are fundamentally distinct in that social media is addictive by design. You could argue that people behave badly regardless of which platform they choose and I wouldn’t disagree but addicted people are being robbed of their autonomy and as a byproduct it is supercharging the proliferation of bad behaviour, toxic outcomes, etc.
In time we will look back on the era of social media in the same way we view the era of smoking now. It’s a poisonous melange of big business, profit, lies and addiction.
only the political ones, and the propaganda bots are pervasive. isolated instances would be more useful.
All I know is the “White House says TikTok’s algorithm and data will be controlled ‘by America’.”
I can’t tell if your
Wrong.
at the end implies you’re not looking to have discussion on this, or you’re here to evangelize.
Either way, ASPD & DPD have existed far longer than the internet, and you could still find inquisitions of witches three centuries ago. Therefore
malicious intent, misinformation and this overwhelming level of ‘toxicity’ was the core design of every social [encounter] in their humble beginnings.
Or just yell “RAPE!”
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?
Fuck you, I think you’re all amazing.
The smaller and more fringe the networks the “realer” people are in my experience.
Probably because a lot of the “people” in the larger networks are literally not “real”. Many of them are secretly bots, and a lot of the rest are either sock puppets or meat puppets
I never really got it. Like linkedin as a way of keeping a link to people you have worked with makes some sense. Its nice for giving and leaving references without people having to chase you down by phone. something like facebook is nice to keep contact with folks you basically lose contact with over time. thats about it to me.
Except it’s also an important tool to ensure continued employment, and so people have taken to turning the public part of it into an unorganized sycophancy contest.
The border between joke and being annoying is always tested by annoying people in digital places.
America is on the cusp of collapse. When you go back 30 years and ask what the difference is between then and now, I think the most obvious answer is the prevalence of social media. Social media is destroying our social order.
I would say the most obvious answer is the increasing authoritarianism of our government and power granted to the wealthy, especially since 9/11 and Reagan.
and Fox News
I would blame the corruption of journalistic integrity, the overreaching government and how history is written by the winners rhetoric before I ever blame social media as to why society is the way it is. The internet has only amplified it and social media isn’t the internet, it is simply a part of it which is another thing people completely refuse to understand.
