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Politics has always reflected poorly on humanity, but the existence of Twitter, Facebook, etc. these days have basically brought Usenet to the masses. Not good
by mwfunk 8y ago
Politics has always reflected poorly on humanity, but the existence of Twitter, Facebook, etc. these days have basically brought Usenet to the masses. Not good Usenet either- bad Usenet, after it was overrun by spammers and trolls.
There’s a truism that the people who talk the most have the least to say. In the 90s you could witness newsgroups slowly get taken over by such people. They went from places where people interacted and communicated to places that were no more than sources of disinformation and flamewars. Modern social media is like post apocalyptic Usenet, except it’s occupied by the general population, not just scammers and mentally ill CS majors. I think that’s really messed up and can’t possibly be good for anyone.
- jeffwass 8y agoIt’s worse than the bad usenet because social media curated the content you engage with into a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. Eg, my twitter feed shows me tweets of similar themes to those that I recently engage with. The more I engage the more that theme dominates my feed. So it’s easy to see that someone who engages with tweets of any partisan political commentary can easily get pulled deeper and deeper into that murk with an echo chamber that filters out the opposing viewpoints. Besides politics the same can happen with conspiracy theories and religious zealotry.