You're "not wrong", but my reading of your comments leads me to believe that you're pointing the finger exclusively (or at least, overwhelmingly and
possibly disproportionately) at one side of the dispute.
> Yes it can be fun, entertaining, informative and educational, it can also be propaganda, misinformation, astroturfing, and a big high school like popularity contest where people are fake and narcissistic but probably insecure.
Social media is an epistemic cesspool, there's no doubt. But do not all of your criticisms also apply (if perhaps to a lesser degree) to all media, and politics, and individual and collective activity, and.....well, everything?
> The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting your information from many sources across spectrums, countries, divides and more.
I feel rather uneasy about whether this is actually as true as it may seem. The thing about "what's true" is, if you've been fooled, you do not realize it. For sure, there are some particularly bad actors online that are often concentrated in certain communities, but how might one know of other bad actors that are not in your mental inventory, or actors who are in your mental inventory labelled as trustworthy, when they are not actually highly trustworthy?
The variance in quality of epistemic and logical reasoning that can be observed, in extremely large quantities even here on HN, when comparing discussions of a technical topic compared to a political topic, is vast - and yet....does it seem likely that the people writing these things here are doing it with conscious and deliberate intent? Does it seem likely that HN folks consciously choose to become peddlers of disinformation, or might it be more likely that this is a consequence of the unusual, often counter-intuitive, and not yet understood innate nature of the human species?
> Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate.
Indeed. Let's hope everyone can truthfully commit to doing this.
I wrote a bit more on this general idea (with respect to conspiracy theorists) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24730753