young voters say social media to blame for divisions in the u.s
thehill.com
A Quinnipiac University poll asked U.S. registered voters to select one of four options to blame for the divisions in the country. Overall, 35 percent blamed social media, 32 percent blamed political leaders, 28 percent blamed cable news channels and only 1 percent blamed other countries.
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Social media exposed the divisions, it didn't cause them.
It does more than that, it magnifies, feeds and perpetuates them. It's not just simple exposition.
Well I remember when being antivax was a meme around 2008.
And social media existed then! In fact, the antivax stuff pretty much lines up directly with the creation of social media.
Well yeah, that's my point, social media was new at that time when antivax was a meme, now it's mainstream. Social media just allowed stupid people to spread stupidity at an alarming rate, then we as a society learned how to manipulate effectively through social media. It's not like social media is some force of nature that accidently fucked up society. Social media is a tool that the richest and worst people in society used to fuck up society.
Granting fascists access to other fascists to become super fascist groups is the most dangerous part of social media.
Given that most of the main social media platforms now are owned by capitalist fascist dickheads, its only going to get worse.
If social networking like Lemmy or Mastodon were more mainstream, we could just name, shame and isolate these monsters. If they can't interact with people outside of their group without getting instanbanned or insta-defederated, then they'll either delve deeper and deeper into their nonsense, until their instances gets raided or they'll venture out of their alt-right safe-haven and get hit with reality and rejoin society.
Dang, came in here to say pretty much the same thing. This has always been there, social media just created an echo chamber.
Good perspective.