Sure, but: 1) The writer, Cal Newport, gets his news from reading a broadsheet newspaper cover to cover every morning. (Not in the link but he's written about

Sure, but: 1) The writer, Cal Newport, gets his news from reading a broadsheet newspaper cover to cover every morning. (Not in the link but he's written about it elsewhere). I think it would be hard to argue that he's less well informed than someone scrolling through reddit, let alone FB or Instagram. 2) He's also said, and I agree, that pre-2006 or so Twitter and FB were pretty benign social media and have a lot of positives. Critically, this is before they developed infinite scrolling style timelines which are setup to maximise engagement. They were just chronological feeds of things posted by people you chose to follow. 3) Similarly to (2), the way those algorithms are optimised is not to deliberately expose you to the views of a wider range of people than you affirmatively chose to follow (although they could be!) but to maximise eyeball-time regardless. It turns out that the way to do that is to let highly emotionally charged and extreme views rise to the top. As a result, the things you see will be either things you violently agree with from your bubble or things likely to trigger an immediate counter-response from what I think of as your anti-bubble. The anti-bubble looks like diverse views but are actually just fully defined as the inverse of the bubble's views. This deadens the space for mutual political engagement. I think that "social media" could do lots of great things if it worked differently but I just don't think that empirically it does.