It's ironic that the front page of HN had a related article: - Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization: https://phys.org/news/2025-10-friends-

It's ironic that the front page of HN had a related article: - Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization: https://phys.org/news/2025-10-friends-division-social-circles-fuel.html https://phys.org/news/2025-10-friends-division-social-circle... tl;dr: More close friends people have, more polarized societies become. It's easy to profile people extensively, and pinpoint them to the same neighborhood, home or social circle. Now what happens when you feed "what you want" to these groups of people you see. You can plant polarization with neighbourhood or home precision and control people en-masse. Knowing or seeing these people doesn't matter. After some time you might find yourself proverbially cutting heads off in the name of what you believe. We used to call these flame wars back then. Now this is called doxxing and swatting. The people you don't know can make life very miserable in a slow-burning way. You might not be feeling it, but this the core principle of slowly cooking the frog.