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Over the years, I’ve had a lot of discussions with Facebook officials about how engagement-based, algorithmic social media changes people.
They tend to argue it doesn’t: It just reveals what’s there. If you don't like how people really are, well, sorry!
They tend to argue it doesn’t: It just reveals what’s there. If you don't like how people really are, well, sorry!
But this great @CWarzel/ @StuartAThompson piece shows otherwise. Yes, social media works with the raw material of people’s interests and temperament. But it rewards some of parts of us, and not others. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/opinion/facebook-far-right.html
We all like the feeling of praise, likes, retweets. That's *particularly* true if we're not getting enough validation in other areas of our life. And so we lean harder in those directions. The parts of us that work online become bigger.
This happens in non-political arenas, too. And often it's good -- you find communities, belonging, prestige, a voice, that your physical location or life circumstances wouldn't have afforded. This was, and often still is, amazing. Ie, Sea Shanty TikTok!
But I'm most interested in the way it changes our politics at scale: The parts of our politics and political personals that work online grow. The parts that don't work fade. That changes the agenda, it changes us. (Tl,dr: Marshall McLuhan was right.)
Biden is the exception that proves the rule. He didn't need to compete on social media for attention because he was Obama's VP. I think the consensus is that's been an advantage for him. But very few politicians, or media figures, can act that way now.
And Biden was also different because he rose up in politics before the era of social media, and so wasn't shaped by its incentives, by what it rewarded and what it ignored. That won't be true in the future.
I'm not saying social media is all bad here. Nor that this is new — television changed us, and every medium before it. But social media does change us, and this is an unusually good window into some particularly clear examples: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/opinion/facebook-far-right.html
