Let's say I subscribe to RSS feeds. Maybe I subscribe to a few dozen sites. With multiple writers, I might exposed to the stupidity of maybe a few hundred people.
With social media, I am in a sense subscribed to the stupidest, or most outrageous posts of tens or millions of people. Stupidity sells. Outrage sells.
But I fully agree with this analogy. The average person isn't hyper-analytical about the choices they make, from media consumption to diet to the amount and quality of their online time, and the default usage path of social media is fraught with I'll effects for both the user and society. And that's to say nothing of generation being raised on these services, who have far less of an ability to resist specific usage patterns when they start (similar to teen smoking).
This two sentence headline style is very jarring to me. Almost like it insults my intelligence.
Social Media in its current state is to show people something emotional to drive engagement. And then drives that idea to the logical conclusion of grouping people with others that will feed off of each other, to further those emotions and engagement. Literally designed to drive each user into finding an abusive relationship to addict themselves to.
This also means that those Social Media sites are the sites responsible for sorting the vulnerable into easy to find groups. So that people who would exploit such groups have easy access to finding their victims.
I don't follow. Do you pick your following list at random from all existing Twitter ids? I follow maybe twenty people, with a very high bar for intellectual honesty, and I have no exposure to "the stupidest or most outrageous posts" on the network.