[artonge]

Not been on facebook fore some years now, but it is not "just" a medium. It is optimized to keep you on the site as much as possible, to show you as many ads as possible. This comes with the hard price of showing you what is divisive, as it keeps you engaged. So they do are responsible for prioritizing divisive posts and allowing ads that are so well targeted that they can make you tilt.

[MuffinFlavored]

> It is optimized to keep you on the site as much as possible

true or false: it pushes content to the top that users choose to engage in/with?

Without users and their behavior, the Facebook platform would be empty/neutral.

It's the users driving the divisiveness, etc.

[artonge]

No, as usual, don’t hate the player, hate the game. Facebook benefits from a huge network effect that locks people in if they want to keep in touch with their close ones. There is no alternative as you can't built a concurrent because facebook do not allow any interaction from the outside world. So people come to facebook to keep in touch, and stay because the content is addictive. Note that moste people are not posting, so they are not even contributing to the content. Note also that social networks are using our brain biase to keep us addicted.