[lovlar]

One of the main reasons we end up with populist leaders who make decisions not in the interest of their population, but in service of their own pursuit of power, is social media and the attention economy.

If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds, media incentives would change. Journalism would become more thorough and responsible, rather than optimized for outrage and clicks. People’s attention spans would recover, making them more capable of listening to opposing views and engaging in meaningful discussion. The overall quality of public debate would improve, and political leaders would be chosen based on objective, long-term policies rather than emotional manipulation.

The reinforcement-learning algorithms that drive these feeds are fundamentally unnatural. They represent a massive, uncontrolled social experiment on humanity—one that is far too powerful for our psychological reward systems to handle.

What needs to happen is education. Education on how the attention economy works. People must learn to resist becoming social media junkies, because every hour surrendered to these platforms reinforces the very systems that distort public discourse. When we lose control over our attention, we don’t just harm ourselves—we actively worsen the societal conditions that enable manipulation, polarization, and poor political leadership.

[Aurornis]

> If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds,

The age groups who spend the most time on TikTok and Instagram are the least likely to have voted for this administration.

There were populist demagogues getting elected before social media and cell phones, too. This isn’t a modern thing.

I know everyone wants to use this moment in politics to blame their own pet peeves, but blaming social media junkies for this election just isn’t consistent.

[PNewling]

The age groups who spend the most time on Facebook feeds though are the most likely to have voted for this administration...

[lovlar]

I dont hink doom scrollers are the root cause, but I belive in that we would have a better political debate and better successful politicians if people who spend a lot of time in feeds were aware of the income they generate for platform companies, and how this fuels the attention economy, which in turn amplifies these problems. One of them being: it incentivizes politicians to be populistic in order to be heard through the noise and be successful.

[PurpleRamen]

> One of the main reasons we end up with populist leaders who make decisions not in the interest of their population, but in service of their own pursuit of power, is social media and the attention economy.

We had the same problems before social media. It's not the cause, just a symptom.

> If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds, media incentives would change.

Many people willingly choose the distraction, they just don't want to bother with politics and stuff. Social Media is just today's most popular distraction at the moment. And Social Media is also useful for those who seek education. It's really more about motivation and presentation than the medium itself.

[greggoB]

> We had the same problems before social media. It's not the cause, just a symptom.

It may not be the cause, but I think it's also not quite just a symptom. To me it looks like social media has taken an existing problem and made it worse, for all the reasons the parent comment describes, and then some.

> And Social Media is also useful for those who seek education. It's really more about motivation and presentation than the medium itself.

Also true, but I'm not sure this is prevalent or impactful enough for it to avoid being a net-negative. Also don't forget about the motivation & presentation of the platforms - they also have some outcomes they can optimize for, and I think there's a strong case to be made that they're optimizing for attention theft.

[mschuster91]

> Journalism would become more thorough and responsible, rather than optimized for outrage and clicks.

For that we would need a new funding model for journalism. Local journalism (i.e. local newspapers, radio and TV stations) used to be financed by classifieds and ads. Classifieds are long since gone off to the Internet and ads have been replaced by Google Maps plus Facebook, so there's no monetary stream - and as a result of that, there's barely anyone left holding local politicians and companies accountable. Yes, some places have "citizen journalists" and bloggers, but these usually do not have the funds to pay for legal teams and court proceedings, so they usually only target government stuff.

Something like taxpayer-paid media is way too easily corruptible by the government, just look at Hungary for the worst possible outcome. "Mandatory contribution" systems like the BBC or Germany's public broadcasters aren't that easily corruptible, but it still happens - just watch the shitshow every few years here in Germany when the contribution needs to be raised.

It's an all-around mess.

[throwaway_aiai]

Why did you feel the need to use an LLM to compose this comment?

[lovlar]

English is not my native language, and I wanted to clean up the grammar.

[rootusrootus]

We honest users of the emdash are sad at LLMs making it unwelcome.

[nikitaga]

The main reason for populism is that the incumbent governments do a consistently poor job satisfying their constituents' preferences and interests, so people get desperate to find something / someone different that might work better. Always has been, always will be, social media or not.

Example: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4230288

We haven't invented a governance structure yet that would be immune to this, although some are better than others. I'm sure the current social media algorithms are harmful as well. You can ban viral algorithms, but the hostile actors whose literal job it is to drive polarization / populism will just find other strategies to effectively deliver their message.

"Education" is nice and all, but millions of people keep smoking despite the obvious harm and decades of education, not to mention the many limitations, taxes, and bans. I mention smoking as an obviously-bad-thing that everyone knows is bad. Education succeeded, and yet, here we are, still puffing poison. But you can also look already-polarized political topics. There's been no shortage of education on those topics either, but if that worked well enough, we wouldn't be decrying populism right now.

[lovlar]

> "Education" is nice and all, but millions of people keep smoking despite the obvious harm and decades of education

I think there’s a missed opportunity for media to make it explicit that by giving their time and attention to these platforms, people are directly generating profit. Way too many assume their involvement has no real effect, but it does. I suspect people would be far less willing to log in if it were clear that each session generates, on average, X dollars in revenue. It’s a business model most people still haven’t fully digested.

[boringg]

Last I checked populism is generally a route to power not actually enacting policy for the people.

[CalChris]

You are writing that comment on a social media platform.

[DeusExMachina]

> One of the main reasons we end up with populist leaders [...] is social media and the attention economy.

This problem of democracy was already discussed in ancient Greece. Social media might have exacerbated it, but it's not new. Over the millennia, nobody found a valid solution, or at least one that is devoid of other problems.

Education is not the solution, as we are probably the most educated populations in history and we are all still prone to the same problem. And who decides what is the correct education? Every side has their own definition, so there you have another problem.