[mmastrac]

Social media is 90% outrage farming by nation states and individuals with agendas. I think the experiment failed. Humans in large groups are so trivially manipulated by algorithms.

Our ape brains at large just can't deal with a firehose of manipulation. We're just giving bad actors a key to our subconscious to destroy the fabric of our civilization, and those bad actors are using it as much as they can.

This article is really missing the discussion on the fact that social media is far, far more inauthentic than real humans these days.

[wenc]

For me

Twitter: anger

Instagram: vanity

Facebook: pride

Of those, I hate anger the most so I am off twitter, even though it’s still a great place to overhear the latest in the business, geopolitics and tech zeitgeist. You literally hear about things before anyone else. But I decided that life is too short to be angry all the time.

I like instagram because it’s entertaining (and am of the age where I can ignore influencer antics). This is not true of younger folks for whom instagram is a mimetic model (there’s so much bad advice on it — especially on how to be a man or a woman today). As an older person, I want to tell young people: don’t get relationship advice off instagram. They’re so shallow and make you so entitled — “if your guy doesn’t do this, you’re too good for him” is pretty toxic.

Facebook used to be this political rage bait place but everyone’s left so I’m still hanging around with my geezer friends in their 40s. It’s become a place to share travel photos and pictures of kids.

Tiktok: I’m too old for Tiktok but I hear young people use it for news.

Google: I still use Google but young people are now increasingly abandoning Google and search on ChatGPT.

[jschveibinz]

I like your summary, but I'd add...

Instagram & TikTok: bad (or even dangerous) medical and self-help advice

[jschveibinz]

I agree, but we all know that political violence (or any radicalized violence) is not new. Social media, or any kind of mass communications, just makes it easier.

[dv_dt]

I think the outcome here is we tried nothing, and now conclude nothing works. Ok, we tried privacy breaking "protect the children" nonsense. We used to have a much more of public announcement/education system for aspects of society for civil education (School House Rock), for nutrition, for public health (vaccination). All of it has since been deemed frivolous public expenditure - maybe because it worked too well and the need became invisible.

[jauntywundrkind]

Fully agreed.

Letting Big Social and governments sock it out to try to make this work doesn't seem like a winning proposition.

I really cherish Bluesky / atproto in huge part because it offers some chance for organic exploration, for individuals & orgs to test and try many ways to make social media work, to defang the Advanced Persistent Threats of the info-world. Without data that wouldn't necessarily count for much, but the firehose & backfill are also quite easy to get: humanity stands some chance, isn't quite in such a dark forest with the adversary here.