I agree that social media is a net negative, but want to also point out that before social media it was the mainstream press and TV have been shaping society for decades. Things like buying a used car from Nixon or fighting in Vietnam etc are all mainstream press impact.
deanc|1 month ago
amiga386|1 month ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
"This sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media"
... say the local TV presenters parroting an identical script from the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns or operates 193 TV stations in the USA, covering 40% of US households
You'd be mad to think that consolidated control of information, the endgame of "mainstream" media, is of benefit to society.
"Mainstream" media is financed either directly by very rich individuals, who then use their control of the thing they own (even just by controlling its hiring policies, to give like-minded people a voice) to spam their own agenda on the populace, or a generic money-making enterprise that then deals with less-affluent people who want to spam the populace (advertisers).
jbreckmckye|1 month ago
A good example is publishing: until relatively recently, books were how most knowledge was distributed, and publishers were able to gatekeep it
Back in the 1990s, one of the promises of the internet, was that it could break this stranglehold. The argument was that instead of 10-ish major publishers, we could have ten billion
What we've ended up with is 5 or so major platforms. Their algorithms now distort, not only the distribution of information, but the production of knowledge itself (click chasing)
An argument I'm sympathetic to, is that the internet hasn't just been a neutral medium, but has actually accelerated this centralisation
The other aspect is the shrinking role of non commercial institutions, like public sector broadcasters, universities, scientific orgs. These entities had their own biases and groupthink. But they added diversity to the media landscape and helped set useful norms