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It’s the streamlined nature of it. People have always been assholes but the ease of production and the streamlined, formulaic ease of digestion makes it particularly prone to outrage porn. Combined with algorithmic selection for popularity, you get addiction to rage.

The author has a reasonable suggestion for reining in this algorithmic steering: "Simply making platforms assume publisher liability for the content that gets served by “For You” pages and similar endless scroll mechanisms would be a massive step towards bringing these companies under control."

And it is increasingly difficult to find out how to vote for a contested County Clerk position.

@ryanlcooper.com those shouldn't be called social media, they are algo media. they don't let people decide what goes viral. but decentralized social media does and that's revolutionary. it makes possible taking away the power over public attention away from mass media owners and advertisers also.

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.

Mob mentality in the palm of your hand

I mean often bad mass publics! (e.g. Fox) And absolutely publishers are liable *today* though if you look at what was written in 18th-early 20th C. newspapers there was ... less concern. I do think social media is pretty bad! They are publishers with none of the restrictions or responsibility.

Isn't that a big part of why it gets Section 230 protection? Because it's speech, thus protected under the First Amendment, and one of the goals of Section 230 is to eliminate nuisance suits that wouldn't succeed anyway because of 1A?

Lol, I know what you mean, but I laugh because I live in a Penguin Rnadom House town, and they do literally throw books at you at the Christmas Parade.

Hmm. Primaries and multiple "go backs" have helped the apathy spread. Ranked voting could help solve that and save money all around. Apathetic voters- what is causing that? Cuz we get exactly what we vote for. Like it or not: I/you/we are the government.

I’m trying to reconcile the idea that the printing press created greater freedom and democracy through access to information but social media did not. Arguably the printing press didn’t immediately create more democracy, but this is as far as I’ve gotten with this idea.