Social media is a cancer on our society. It is both the asbestos and cigarettes of our generation.

You reap what you sew. Stupid and uninformed voices receiving equivalent status to wise scientific experts was a mistake. Witnessing the flat Earth crowd growing over the decades encapsulates everything wrong with social media.

Without social media, we'd be left with mainstream media, which is a very narrow set of channels that those in power can control. Despite rampant censorship on social media, it's still the best way to circumvent propaganda and give people a voice.

Social media would be entirely different if there were no monetization on political content. There's a whole lot of ragebaiting/engagement-farming for views. I don't know how to filter for political content, but it's worth a shot. People are free to say whatever they want, but they don't need to get paid for it.

My main case against at this point is that everything you post will be accessible by "bad" AI

I've seen numerous posts from researchers on X demonstrating that people high in psychopathy, low in empathy, and low in cognitive ability are overrepresented on social media. They post more often and fuel polarisation in politics. The extremism is entertaining to others and rewarded with exposure. Political moderates don't tend to get as emotionally invested and are less likely to voice their opinions in the first place. But underlying the extremism and polarisation are real issues. There's often an overlooked middleground that technology can step in to highlight

"In conclusion: " "...in particular in the U.S., but probably across Europe as well. ..."

The world is rather larger than the US and Europe. I physically endure myopia and frankly Mr Witkin seems to figuratively suffer from it.

I need only mention the name: TikTok.

We, consumers online, are sliced and diced on every single dimension possible in order to optimize our clicks for another penny.

As a side benefit, when you do this enough, the pendulum that goes over the middle line for any of these arbitrary-but-improves-clicks division builds momentum until it hits the extremes. On either side-- it doesn't matter, cause it will swing back just as hard, again and again.

As a side benefit the back and forth of the pendulum is very distracting to the public so we do not pay attention to who is pushing it. Billions of collective hours spent fighting with no progress except for the wallets of rich ppl.

It almost feels like a conspiracy but I think it's just the direct, natural result of the vice driven economy we have these days

I used to be disappointed in myself that I didn't understand Discord well enough to use it.

Now I'm glad I never understood it well enough to use it.