You are right but I would use a different tone for what you're describing. E.g. I've seen a lot more antisemitism and full-blown racism on Twitter than I did in the past.
I vacillate on the value of seeing this stuff. Sometimes I think its important my radar be aware that these attitudes are way more prevalent in society than they used to be. Lot's of my not-on-twitter peers I suspect are in a bubble and don't realize how much societal decay there has been around norms and batsh*t conspiracy thinking. As a citizen I think it's important not to be in a total bubble until the frog boiling temperature is reached.
At the same time, I'm pretty sure that low grade daily exposure to "look at all these neighbors of yours who wish you were dead" overstates the prevalence and the fact that the people who feel this way do so in no small part because they are getting a daily algo feed claiming I wish they were dead (spoiler - I don't want them dead). Since I find it really hard to break my Twitter addiction there is something about all of these emotions which keeps some susceptible humans like myself clicking, but like the article says, it's quite rare that I emerge from an hour of Twitter scrolling feeling anything but gross.
All of this is frustrating because I was very late to Twitter. I joined a year or two before the acquisition. I loved how I could connect with all sorts of interesting brilliant people in all sorts of interesting fields. I wish I could get that back but I guess that iteration of Twitter didn't sell enough ads.
nuts. i joined in 2008. that was when it was cool.
I have no doubt there ARE people out there with those horrific views and ARE actually making AI generated meme slop and posting it feeling satisfied, but I choose to believe that the vast majority are bots, and a fraction of the real humans doing it learned it from the bots. Just reading that sort of shit over and over again can change how you think about things if you aren't vigilant and the outcomes are more division. Plenty of bad folks in the world just want the division. They want people mad, and feeling afraid.
The times I've had the misfortune of reading replies on xitter, even on what should be technical topics, they have consisted of extremist maximalist takes with others chiming in to call them "based" [0]. Whatever its "algorithm" is, it definitely leans into the outrage farming / Balkanization project, regardless of the bots.
[0] which from context would seem to be shorthand for "freebased", as in smoking crack, despite apparent intent to the contrary