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something I'd add to this is that social media, by selecting for the most attention-grabbing content, simultaneously mass produces angry, paranoid, xenophobic morons (ie fascists) and undermines the foundation of public literacy itself

you have a situation where instead of swing voters making decisions informed at least partly by eg, the local newspaper they glance at occasionally, it's entirely delirious lunatics on TikTok

i'd take it even a step further than you do: it's not that social media produces fascists, but that it produces antisocial behaviour broadly, where even good acts of protest can quickly devolve online into just another method for expressing antisocial impulses in a way that feels "safe" to do

yeah, I think that's right. and relatedly I think it cannibalizes in-person social institutions by substituting a worse but omnipresent version of human interactions

i'm reminded that when "social media" started it was called "social networking," and i'd always thought the shift was arbitrary. but i recently realized it's because networking is concrete, it's a direct method for forming relationships. media is definitionally an abstraction of reality.

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