Social media isn't the problem, low-information mob behavior has always been a thing. Pretty much all of the lynchings that ever happened in the USA occurred wa

Social media isn't the problem, low-information mob behavior has always been a thing. Pretty much all of the lynchings that ever happened in the USA occurred way before Jack Dorsey was a twinkle in his father's eye. The problem is the structural flaws built into our brains. Consider vision. If I showed you a wall of visual noise with a human face somewhere in the middle, you'd likely pick out the face in an instant. That's because we have physical structures in our visual cortex that specifically filter the information coming down the optic nerve for human faces. What's funny is that higher judgement seems to work the same way. For most of the history of homo sapiens, we've lived in relatively small groups, and only interacted with comparatively limited amounts of information (compared to the typical internet feed). Think about all the things represented by scrolling down instagram: products and their place in your life, hundreds of people you've met over many years, trends and fads and memes which are themselves complex multi-layered ideas requiring lots of insider knowledge to grasp. All of this is way more information than what a typical person had to deal with until about 100 years ago at the earliest. So what's a brain to do? Our minds filter the incoming information until it's distilled down to the simplest possible version, the one with little nuance and zero subtlety. That's the idea that catches, because we lack the machinery to process 10,000 minor details for every little thing we do all the time. Apply this to political discourse and you'll see why major political candidates spend precious minutes arguing over whether "socialism is bad," or "capitalism is bad." I'm sure many here understand it's way more complicated than that, but if you tried to get a real discussion going about nit-picky policy stuff, it'd go nowhere. I'm not about to decry "attention spans these days" or anything, because frankly I don't think people are any different than they were 500 years ago, not really. And that's the problem. The only thing that's changed is what amounts to "common knowledge" these days, which is usually also an oversimplification of scientific reality. The problem is that the world is just too big and too complex for our ill-adapted chimp brains to fully grasp, at least at the population scale, and Twitter and the like amplify this effect. I don't have any solutions. But I know that we should keep doing the one thing humans are good at: building better tools. We can't exactly make society less complex, but we can probably make tools to understand it without losing (as much) nuance. That's the only option I can see for fixing this sort of thing in the near-future, because even if these social media problems created selection pressure on humans (which I doubt), it'd be a long long time before we were cranking out baby Homo Interneticus.