I am certainly far from the first one to think of this, but it really is true. Social media sites are actually designed to be echo chambers.
It’s a problem that maybe was just never considered from the inception of social media, or perhaps if I were more cynical I’d say it was actually planned.
If you design a system that works hard to make people anxious and addicted to it, and then slowly show them more and more content that re-affirms their existing fears worst beliefs, you create an echo chamber.
The shocking part is just how vulnerable people are to this. All they need to do is simply be exposed to a stupid idea that resonates with them, and that’s all it takes. They click more and more of the same types of content that all peddle the same idiotic BS, and they only interact with other susceptible simpletons like themselves, and pretty soon they start getting more and more extreme in their views.
And there is no way to really shake them out of it. They are going to continue being presented with the same ridiculous views. And since those are the only views they encounter, they believe that they must be correct.
After all, everybody is saying it, and nobody is disputing it.
The pandemic likely made things much worse, since people were stuck at home on social media. It was just overall a bad situation.
I don’t use very many social media channels and of the ones I have, I don’t typically interact much, so I can’t truly say what they are doing about this or how things have changed.
From my limited time and experience on Facebook, it appears that what they’ve done to combat this effect is to mostly just show you niche hobby content or mindless entertainment.
I guess they figure that they are best off if their users maximize their time spent on the platform consuming pointless entertainment, rather than becoming extremists pushing for civil war and undermining the stability of the country in which the platform is based.
Which makes sense.
I just hope that these companies do enough to change things, and that they do it fast enough to avoid major problems in our country and in the world. It seems that people are getting dumber each day and the world order less stable, so time really is of the essence.