That's what is called the echo chamber... slowly sliding into it with Facebook's engineering help.
What it leads to, we were able to witness yesterday.
What it leads to, we were able to witness yesterday.
I believe that information being freed from top-down control is a necessary process for the improvement of our civilization. The alternative just leads to more corruption, slavery, and death.
The book Weapons of Math Destruction was published in 2016, and the conclusions therein were not exactly new at the time either.[ß] The business model of ad-based social media is focused on generating engagement, above all else.
Nothing generates more engagement than outrage, fear, or playing to primal instincts. To satisfy that demand, content providers are encouraged to generate the maximal outrage and foment fear. Social media platforms are incentivised to direct people towards that content, because they make more money that way.
The end result: social media platforms automate pile-on and radicalisation at the speed of lies, at global scale. Not because they are inherently evil, but because they are making money off of people being inherently terrible.
ß: The real meat of the book is in the first two chapters, as far as I'm concerned. Everything else in there is just repeating the arguments.