Whaat? You are telling me... Facebook and le Instragram... are not good things for me?

The social media problem is very simple to solve. Ban advertising on social media (from platform or users) and ban usage of user data external to the platform.

When you remove the incentive to engage users, the companies will engage in less abusive practices to push engagement.

I've never seen this proposed, and I'm confused why.

The profit motive is largely what drives these problems.

My big dream is a social media platform for humans. Self-hostable Zoom / Discord alternative that just works. AGPL-licensed and eventually turned over to the GNU project for long-term maintenance once it's feature-complete. Mastadon is nice and all, but micro-blogging isn't really for ordinary humans.

To me this just reads like fear mongering and shilling for the status quo political establishment. I've recently been learning a bit about Russian history and it has similarities to their conservative nobility throughout the 19th century trying through various means to suppress the spread of liberalism in the public and intelligentsia: the point being that Russia had serious social ills like serfdom and radical political ideas were absolutely warranted. Social media is destabilizing for the influence of establishment sources of information and more of the public (right and left) is finding out more accurate information about how the world works, then coming to natural conclusions about how to address various social ills. Polarization may be increasing, but people forming stronger opinions is also exactly what you would expect in the face of increased revelation about unsolved social problems. Ultimately, I'm optimistic about the long term effects of social media on politics.

"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.

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.

I see this step progression:

1. people having real problems, like employment, housing, health, or education access

2. they go online (or watch TV) finding all sorts of extreme takes and biases; these theories provide simple explanations and ways to pin the blame on others

3. they converge on identity based reasoning, where dialogue becomes impossible, tribal; their posts signal adherence to in-group and rejection of the out-group, no longer tied to reason

4. they vote against their own best interests, such as recent elections (Trump) and referendums (Brexit) or refuse the vaccine (10x higher death rate, observed in hindsight)

The thing that is different now is that we have social networks, and that the outcomes are so drastic they are surprising everyone. Could be a coincidence, but I don't think it is.

So it's: real problems -> toxic social media & tv takes -> identity politics

[dead]