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Comment by natsup123490 | Hacker News Reader

I have to speculate that the reason why "social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general" is oftentimes because it highlights their apparent failings (biases, lies, etc). That is, the problem is not primarily one of people failing to trust in trustworthy institutions, but due to a hyper-focus (retweeting) on the failings of those institutions.

As we communicate more, we find we don't agree as much as we thought we did, and that is divisive. Social media allows us to highlight and amplify the information about our disagreements.

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> Social media allows us to highlight and amplify the information about our disagreements.

In theory.

In practice most people are too busy living their lifes and going through their struggles to voice anything. Leaving these platforms to be flooded by a vocal minority or worse, actors with an agenda.

This in turn provides a warped vision of reality to the 99% of non contributing 'listeners'.

Isn't that a description of traditional media?

Doesn't seem this is a fundamental change that caused the current divide. It's something deeper.

Traditional media would not be flooded with extreme right or extreme left, or conspiracy theories without any evidence backing.

The current Turner/Murdoch media in the US is definitely not my understanding of 'traditional' journalism of the likes of Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters.

Turner/Murdoch is traditional journalism though. I see no reason why these wouldn't exist today even without the internet.

I disagree. Social media as now implemented are Darwinian black boxes optimized to evolve the most contagious memes, because engagement is stupidly easy to optimize for compared to any sane metric. As it turns out, the things we share the most when encouraged to do so are finely distilled vitriol. Moderated tone is critically important and good faith in disagreement is vital to a conversation. Twitter, is instead, the digital equivalent of literal shouting. It doesn’t really matter what exactly random strangers are shouting about in my estimate…

Yes. At its core, the issue with social media is that it amplifies "engagement" at the cost of anything else. It is impossible to breed socially productive ideas, in the allegory you describe, if your only focus is infectiousness. What you are left with are literal mental viruses that take up our collective mind space, leaving nothing in return.

Telling these institutions that if they want more trust, that they should earn it, is missing the point. The entire reason for ensuring trust in an institution is so that you can then cash in on it. It's marketing. The notion that these institutions were ever trustworthy is the remnants of whatever messaging you've internalized from them.

The freer expression and archival powers of the internet allow for people to see through the scam more and more. The division is hardly "right" and "left" (having almost nothing to do with economics). It's cultural at the low end, but higher up it's about trust, and whether one feels that institutional authority can or should be trusted at all.

"The notion that these institutions were ever trustworthy is the remnants of whatever messaging you've internalized from them."

Bingo. If anything, exposure and discussion of their misconduct should incentivize changes/improvements.

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