Any story about threats by the Internet to democracy that revolve around Twitter has to account for the fact that only a minute portion of the electorate ever looks at Twitter.
The article mentions basically all major social media though.
Besides, even if it was just about twitter, it can only take a small portion of the population to swing an election. Word of mouth is also downstream from twitter. People might not see something on twitter, but they might hear it from someone who saw it there.
I couldn't agree more. One day I uninstalled twitter(x) and I just kinda forgot about it. A couple of times I tried to look at where the icon used to be and never really felt the urge to reinstall.
I like to think that I am not alone in this and this happened to hundreds of thousands of people. When you overly optimize for engagement at some point you cause burnout and loss of interest. It felt funny seeing musk claim that all twitter statistics were going up without realizing the cost of it. Social media has to strike a very strong balance to keep you engaged, but not too engaged.
It’s not about social networks but algorithmic feeds. The same issues pop up with YouTube or any other website that shows you content that it thinks is more likely to engage your attention.
Right, I get that, but the article is heavily weighted towards examples of Elon Musk and the Republicans colluding to shape specifically the feed on Twitter. I agree that it's bad that's happened (in the sense of Twitter is now a much less credible platform as a result), but, again, if you're talking about destabilizing entire democracies you have to account for the fact that Musk has direct influence only over a social network very few people pay attention to.
I agree FOX News is a much more successful tool for pushing a neofascist agenda, but Twitter YouTube and other various individually engagement-tuned sources are recruiting a new audience and helping fragment the consensus on objective reality.
If you believe Biden’s election was stolen, you are likely to have that belief reinforced by low-quality media targeted at you.
Besides, even if it was just about twitter, it can only take a small portion of the population to swing an election. Word of mouth is also downstream from twitter. People might not see something on twitter, but they might hear it from someone who saw it there.