Seriously! Go do it now! These sites are built with the goal of pushing people into groups that are always angry at each other. Angry polarized groups spend more time on the site and are easier to sell things to.
The only thing ignoring this trash will do is make you a happier, more functional person.
It's not different from being sports fan. Making noise from the couch but not having no effect in the game and annoying people who don't follow.
They have no serious purpose. They are just wasting energy.
"wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government" Thomas Jefferson (https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/60.html)
Engaging in the political dialogue is not wasted energy. Low level engagement on social media might be about as impactful as filling a stadium to see a politician speak during a pandemic but high level engagement is really the only way to participate in American democracy right now. If it wasn't valuable, nobody would be training bots to disrupt the process by amplifying division and hate.
Sane politicians aren't going door to door these days or standing on crowded street corners. They're interacting on social media.
The fact that social media sites are a valuable manipulation target to certain people doesn't make them valuable to you as a consumer. To the contrary.
As it is practised in the internet it's horrible destructive energy in the internet.
Actual political work is much better.
>Sane politicians
Yes. Politicians. They also do actual political work. Public that spends hours in political internet and does not engage outside it goes insane.
We're learning to deal with new forms of propaganda the same way we dealt with the old ones. I remember when people were talking about the information overload of the early days of the internet as driving people insane. Or people who complained about TV advertising being a form of mind control.
People that can't cope will either succumb to the will of others or retreat but that doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't keep using these tools to our advantage.
> Yes. Politicians. They also do actual political work.
Isn't it clear that renaming post-offices a few months before they're defunded qualifies as actual political work or filling stadiums of people to give them a rock concert version of the political experience or hosting twitch streams of a co-op video game to an audience of 500k people? You might consider grilling social media companies for not doing enough to promote for their party's interests "political work" but when it's done in a chamber dedicated to governing through legislation and comes of as whining or yet another attempt at pandering it misses any loftier goals you're implying might exist.
My point is that is that it’s possible to filter out a lot of the political garbage on those sites if one wishes, but it does appear to be getting more difficult since political stuff is appearing more and more often in places that I personally wouldn’t expect.
Started seeing tons of tweets from people who decided my area was next. Tons of people going out about how they were going to burn us down. Then watching them as they all started heading our way.
Thankfully they found all the exits blocked by police.
I don’t own guns. But my area is big on gun rights. Looters vs gun nuts.
So yea, well. It’s a pretty screwed up situation. Like one step from civiL war screwed up.
Not sure what that would look like though. Cigarettes have scary labels and enforced age requirements. Maybe social media would have to change the way likes/upvotes/etc work to be less polarizing, in addition to an age limit enforcement?
https://www.epa.gov/environmental-topics/chemicals-and-toxic...
https://www.epa.gov/fera/dose-response-assessment-assessing-...
How did we build these tables?
Same process will apply to how much dopamine (and whatever else) you can keep giving a kid or a group of people over time without serious consequences
Whether that takes 2 years or 20 years more to tabulate, lots of people will take a hit thanks to their internal reward mechanisms being gamed.
According to me, they have at best been ineffectual, and more commonly made a bad thing worse.
I think/hope we're in a transitional phase of our civilization where we haven't figured out how to handle these new things yet. Over time, institutions will emerge. They always do, right?
If the networks join up, letting people interact, enabling or encouraging hate between each other, there is an incentive for members of each group to report the illegal networks to the authorities to harm “the other lot”.
(This is just an off-the-cuff thought, I’m a long way from understanding sociopolitical dynamics)
It started slightly innocently but at some point it became a product.
Yes water vapor is safe. But additives are poorly regulated/understood.
But people are destroying their lungs faster then cigarettes ever did.
From a distance, it looks like some of those same problems are contributing to the USA's polarisation. Fixing them will be much more important, and much harder, than just tuning out obnoxious media.
I mean, HN is a "single feed" which avoids the belligerent group dynamics... but culture bleeds.
The narrative dichotomies and other elements of this belligerence dynamic (I think it's more belligerence than polarisation, btw) exist here and other social media that isn't explicitly structured for it like twitter, reddit or fb. Is massive, many-2-many communication a lost cause?
Ignoring this will make a single individual better, but that will only leave you back at square one - which is being at the mercy of the America news media environment.
For an individual this may be the right call, for the scope and scale of the issue being discussed in this article, it doesn’t seem like it.
Now I still suggest people to reduce online activities as much as possible. It's probably a long term neurological disease.
How does civil society survive if we're just a collection of tribal groups pursuing divided interests and throwing rocks at each other?
Traditional Mainstream media take sides and present one side as orthodox and the other as heterodox.
Google is guilty of soft censorship (either deranks, or with autocomplete refuses to autocomplete search phrases that are contrarian to orthodoxy).
Why poison the well that opened up global communication and brought us closer together? Why promote anti-globalism and distrust in journalism while disrupting the lines of communication? Are we being primed for war? genocide? mass-depopulation? Whatever it is, the last thing people should do is comply.
The numerous little independent journalists rarely get that level of help from a senator. They have no chance against the censorship.
How about next time?
Fact checking became a thing less for facts and more as an attack tool.
I’ve been part of as agencies. They go out of their way to make sure their is only one viewpoint on anything that gets ad dollars.
Makes it difficult for other side to run a media company if they can’t get advertising dollars.
Presumably Hunter Biden traded on his famous name to get job opportunities (in a smaller way than the Trump kids), but I've seen no credible evidence (and please don't reply with a gish-gallop of shady twitter and youtube links) that Joe Biden compromised his office to assist his son.
How ironic. Have you read the linked article? Way to prove its point.
Some institutions being actively soaked in identity politics and other divisive elements:
Higher education
Lower Education
United Nations
Local government bodies
Charity Organizations
Sports
The internet is causing the growth of IdPol as well as the growth of the movement against it.
IMHO, we need a return to "boring" centrist politics.
It's very hard to be apolitical. Almost all behavior can be interpreted politically.
What has really changed is it's much easier to obtain information about an organization and the individuals involved. In the past you might have simply not known enough to peg someone politically. Hence the impression of neutrality. Today it's just harder to create this illusion.