A Boring Dystopia

Definitely only destroyed. While journalistic integrity has always been something fragile and often lacking, the shift of news media to try to capture the social media audience while simultaneously trying to “compete” with the content aggregators has led to much more vapid and misleading reporting.

24 hour cable news was the death knell for news media, and social media has been the final nail in the coffin. It accelerated the decline in journalistic standards to a ridiculous degree.

Any time I look at Facebook or X(formerly twitter), I see two sides of the same shit-smeared coin.

On Facebook, feels like a majority of the random comments I see are all scum of the earth, racist, sexist, fascist etc. Every post about a new marvel movie is filled with comments about how the movie is going to be ahit because of "forced diversity" and "wokeness" - any political post is all about how dems should die, or aoc needs to be murdered, etc. And it's never just a few people, its dozens, with hundreds of likes and supporting comments.

On the other site, it's mostly blue-haired "bleeding heart liberals" who are so liberal they've come full circle back to fascism. Trying to restrict people's rights because they have some shitty ideas, or completely ruining people's careers over a rumor.

Before social media, you would be forced into public places to have these conversations, and you'd be forced to interact and learn what people who don't agree with you have to say and think, and that broadened your worldview. Now facebook and xitter just feed you into an algorithm and spit you out in a bubble with other people with the same ideas, because you'll all agree and converse and engage more, because there's positive reinforcement there, and from that point its a feedback loop slowly making you more liberal or conservative, when typically most people would fall pretty close to center, give or take some hot button issues like guns and babies.

Before social media, we used to converse in physical spaces and got more diverse ideas and attitudes. After social media, the algorithms (and ourselves) nudge us into ideological spaces where diversity suffers.

Good point! No one brags about control because they care about those they control. Its the power they value.