notsosureMeta in particular, and social media in general, have greatly contributed to the decay of democracy.
Nah, it’s worse than just giving everyone a voice. That wouldn’t be too bad.
The really bad part is that they figured out about more extreme/controversial/negative voices tend to draw more engagement, more time spent on platform, and therefore more ad views. Facebook and the rest didn’t just give the worst of us a voice – they amplified the voices of the worst of us, far more than for normal people, all in the name of squeezing just a little bit more profit out of the system.
Nicely summed up. One more point though: “Using the propaganda model…news businesses favoring profit over the public interest succeed, whilst those favoring reportorial accuracy over profits fail — and are relegated to the margins of their markets (low sales and ratings)”.
