Americans Agree: Social Media Is Divisive (But We Keep Using It)

I'm mid-30s and deleted my Facebook a couple years ago. Although most of my friends and family sympathize with my reasoning, very few have followed in my footsteps. I find that mildly depression.

I'm trying to stay away from the social networks, but somehow our local running club decided that Facebook is the best way to communicate with external world.

I think most or at least a significant portion of people will remain news junkies, but a lot of people are waking up to what "news" really is after witnessing how much of it is actually "breaking news" that's hardly fact-checked or not at all. People are believing journalists less and less, yet journalists on the whole don't seem bothered enough to take action to correct their image. Having worked with journalists, a lot of them are concerned with their image; I'm just not sure that an appreciable amount will ever actually try to do something about it.

Even taking an extended break from Facebook can be beneficial. Back in 2015, I took a 9 month break and came back to it with a different set of eyes. It inoculated me to the need to constantly check my feed. I kept my profile for a long time because it served as a contact list, but the other day I decided to up and delete it. I couldn't be happier. Everyone who actually mattered is in my email contacts. There are actually people claiming "email is out", yet there's nobody I know who doesn't have an email or who doesn't respond to them. If you've got someone's email and phone number, the chances that you'll lose contact with them for good is very small. Just have the courage to reach out to them every once in a while rather than wait for others to post a photo of their dinner plate so you can "like" it to let them know you still exist. People feel special when others reach out to them, even if it's just to see how they're doing, and I know I would rather get a text from one person saying "s'up?" than a bunch of "likes".

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Places like HN, Reddit, Discord, etc., are all far more social than what people dub "social media".

>> place more blame on the binary political parties, as well as the mainstream media.

Those are also just different mirrors. Social media is a greater number of faster-responding mirrors, but the concept remains the same: the content reflects the desires of the audience.

I place all the blame on individual users. They are the ones that must alter their behavior. Each individual must come to understand how they manipulate the content they see. I don't blame talk radio and facebook for turning my aunt into a crazed right-wing conspiracy theorist (the really bad type. She believed pizzagate, probably still does.) She has done this to herself and only she can dig herself out of the hole. The family can support her, as one would any other addict, but the individual must want to change.

==The current state of social media is a symptom; it's a mirror. ==

This is true, but its worth acknowledging that these apps are purposefully built to be addictive [1]. Things like endless scroll, pull to refresh, like buttons, gamification, and more have been developed to make that mirror more psychologically compulsive.

[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/trapped-the-s...

Isn't the flat earth phenomena interesting? It's clear that almost nobody believes this, probably including many of those who claim they do. Nonetheless there seems to be relatively large numbers of people who at least claim to do so. Strange isn't it? Not really. In a connected world you can get your message out to millions of people with greater than ever ease. If 99.9% of people do not agree with you, that means 0.1% do. And that's literally millions of people!

Most people consciously think they would prefer to associate with people they "identify" with. In real life you don't have much in the way of signaling so this process was not especially efficient. And that was a great thing. It meant people who had completely different worldviews would end up becoming friends, and having some fun if not heated debates at times. And most importantly they also kept each other tethered to reality. Enter social media. Now, no matter how extreme a group you "identify" with, you can find millions of people fitting that. And people utilize this to filter people down to just these people.

But this filtering now tends to drive divisiveness in two big ways. The first is that as people lose contact with those they do not "identify" with, it creates a dehumanization. The other issue is the even bigger one, and also contributes heavily to the first -- people lose touch with reality. Imagine the answer to a problem is 0. You have one group that insists it's at least 20, and another that insists it's at most -20. Now all the 20+ guys join together. And now thinking it's 25 is really kind of moderate - literally nobody thinks it's less than 20 and lots of people even think it might be in the 30s, or higher! Their collective starts going further and further up. Next thing you know the average is 30, then 40, then ... And vice versa for the other group. This likely a similar process to how you get from 'dress modestly' to 'wear opaque black sacks that cover everything including the eyes.' It's a homogeneous collective raging on in who can be more virtuous (by the standards of the collective) without any sort of counter-balancing force going "I LOVE BIKINIS! Live free and natural. Nude beaches are what we need!"

But the key point of this all is that this filtering would be impossible without social media. I completely agree that the media is contributing heavily to this, as well as politicians, especially those who play into identity politics. But on the other hand, I think their behavior is arguably more of an effect than a cause. In a divided world, the way you make money with things such as media is not by walking the line, it's by jumping off the deep end one way or the other. And similarly for politicians. People actually get angry when people in any way work with "the other side." Consider the outrage that Musk would dare work on a presidential advisory board where he would actually have a voice that'd go straight to the president.

I'm fairly sure I've written a book's worth of HN comments. I've seriously considered trying to extract the top-rated ones and weave them into a book.

I think social media is a tipping point for a lot of basic human behavior - a threshold has been crossed. Sure, it's just amplifying normal human behavior, but so does cocaine. (Remember the wise words of Bill Cosby here... he asked someone to explain the appeal of cocaine, and they said "It intensifies your personality". He said "But what if you're an asshole?")

Twitter and Facebook in 2019 are both dumpster fires, but they aren't the totality of social media. Before (and concurrent to) them we had Friendster, Myspace, Orkut, and a plethora of hybrid services that have social networking features.

Facebook and Twitter (1) optimize for mobile, where expressing complex thought is difficult, (2) perform relentless A/B engagement testing seemingly without accounting for the fact that people engage with things that make them unhappy, and (3) have a huge news/media presence. I think all these elements and probably more contributed to the cancer these services have become.

Sounds like a BBS.

Wasn’t that AOL. Email, instant messenger, profiles, chat rooms all in one place where everyone spent countless hours?

You could say it was a starting point/portal...but where else was anyone going back then to spend significant time?

The problem is that the kind of game-ified simulacrum of socialization that social media often is doesn't promote connecting with people at all. Indeed, it seems to me that very few things in contemporary society do.

You're ignoring the fact that "Facebook dot com" isn't just used by those with a Facebook account; it is also used by Facebook-the-company and its customers (advertisers, propagandists, etc.) against those with a Facebook account (in order to extract revenue). This leads to things like "optimising for engagement", and outrage turns out to be highly engaging and easy to produce.

I need this for emails as well. Clippy: Looks like you're trying to send an angry email, would you like to save it as a draft and read it when you're thinking straight?

>No media altogether or force people to think alike?

I'd say media already tries (and succeeds for a lot of things) to make people think alike

==How many of these "social media bad" articles are we really going to get from the news industry?==

How many dieting articles are written by the news industry?

==If these journalists are right and social media is so bad, why are journalists so prominent on twitter and much of social media?==

Because they have to be to make money, that doesn't help answer the question of whether or not they are bad themselves. There is a difference between a corporation (profit-seeking entity) and an individual (happiness-seeking entity). It makes sense that they may have different views on what is good/bad.

But in your comment, you just question everything without giving degree to which things are affected.

I believe these statement give better feeling about the proportionality of each media source:

Yes journalists are sometimes wrong, but most of the time they do their best to research a subject.

Don't go to comment section unless you want to loose your faith in humanity, there are some insights there sometimes but most of the time comment section is just full of angry people. (The Atlantic removed comment section altogether).

Social media (Facebook, twitter and the like) thrive on divisiveness, sensationalism and appealing to gut instinct rather then exploring any kind of intellectual idea. That is what platforms are made for, with the system of how things get promoted, shared and rewarded -- counting engagement instead of value to individuals and society.

Guess where all the advertising dollars go in this case, papers are loosing money because any kind of attempt to examine ideas is a lot less interesting for the advertisers because all they want pay money for is engagement.