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Comment by Juliate | Hacker News Reader

Oh yes they do. And were very happy with it until they understood the nature of social media is not to connect people, but to socialize them into bubbles that become antagonists to each other.

In corrupt places as well as democratic, peaceful places, it creates disruption and discontent through dissemination of (true - or false - doesn't matter) informations that in turn fuels civil unrest.

In corrupt places, this unrest is an opportunity for improvement. In non-corrupt ones, it is an opportunity for worsening.

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In corrupt places, this unrest is an opportunity for improvement. In non-corrupt ones, it is an opportunity for worsening.

Rather, in all places it is an opportunity for change. It's just that the upwards potential is a lot bigger than downwards in corrupt places.

> It's just that the upwards potential is a lot bigger than downwards in corrupt places.

I suggest that the opportunity for downward is just as big as the opportunity for upward, if the Rohingya situation in Myanmar is anything to measure by.

Yes and the full downwards potential is more like the holocaust I think or actually larger than that

So social media creating artificial strife amongst people has been a good change? Yea, theres some good from social media, but it seems to constantly require "change". Even in perfectly peaceful circles of societies, its dividing people into radicalized factions all in the name of tribe identity. That and the increasing studies showcasing the detrimental mental health affects it has on people. It truly is becoming more of a burden as time goes on. It's not like social media is truly democratic. They're monarchies that give an illusion of public control.

I was about to say, the unrest fomented in Syria didn't exactly lead to improvement.

The whole world was a magnitude more in the bubble before social media. Many people live their whole lives in a small region.

Yes, definitely valuable. On the other hand, people are demonstrably less generous in their assumptions about other people's motivations and more likely to objectify them in the classic sense if they have not and will almost certainly never encounter them in real life.

Double edged sword to be sure. It's great that people get access to better information, but we need to evolve as a species in order to handle bubbles this big.

A much larger number of much smaller bubbles whose edges didn’t touch each other.

Now we have a few large bubbles who insist that the smaller bubbles become part of them or else...

Yes, the Internet makes the antagonistic bubbles larger, and more angry?, I was just going to write

I think you're missing something about the idea of a bubble. I live around people with many different beliefs, but I am fairly socially isolated from them, meanwhile my information diet consists of a fairly narrow set of ideas and viewpoints. The size of your bubble isn't directly determined by the number of people in it, it's the number of viewpoints, ideas, perspectives, life experiences, etc. you are exposed to.

This is pretty much it. We saw from the Arab Spring that Twitter can start a revolution. Whether you need it or not, whether it improves matters or not. Everyone claims to be some sort of insurgent now.

> true - or false - doesn't matter

I happen to think this matters rather a lot, but not everybody agrees.

It does not matter in the sense that it does create fertile ground for disruption by enabling bubbles of people to form and ostracize each other.

It does matter in the sense that what is built on lies, besides being immoral, is unproductive, as it will always come back to bite everyone.

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