Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

Wasn't early Facebook all about connecting with friends and family and looking for boyfriend/girlfriend? Today I only hear something like "fake news, hate, racism, violence" etc.

I wonder what has changed? I think that it is not Facebook's management fault but the reality kicked in. Medium like Facebook is convenient for all type of content and interaction unlike Instagram for example which is more for showing off with photos and following other people's lives.

Social media is as successful as it is precisely because it works so well as a communications paradigm. No popular social media platform is difficult to communicate on, they draw in so many users because they're easy to use.

My mother who can barely use Windows knows how to chat with me on Facebook. People use social media to communicate between friends, family, coworkers etc all the time. That's how all of that monetizable data gets generated.

Yes, the purpose of social media is to profit from user-generated content and data, but it still works as intended for 99% of people.

There's a lot of 'political' content on instagram. do a quick google search for 'politigram' and you'll see what I'm talking about. That being said, there are definitely per-platform affordances that may change the degree and extent to which its expressed (and, crucially, to whom).

This might be an unpopular opinion but I am getting very tired of academics thinking they can comment cross discipline and journalists somehow think it is worthy of writing an article about. This scientist isn't bringing any interesting, new ideas to the table, they are just repeating the same talking points pushed by mainstream "liberal" politicians.

> My sense is that social media in particular — as well as a broader range of internet technologies, including algorithmically driven search and click-based advertising — have changed the way that people get information and form opinions about the world. And they seem to have done so in a manner that makes people particularly vulnerable to the spread of misinformation and disinformation.

This is such an unbelievably shallow take. Much of the "truth" mainstream liberals have been pushing in the past year has turned out to be false. In the past, before the internet and social media, the media lied to the public all the time. It was probably easier because regular people didn't have a good way to spread primary information quickly. The media got most of their information from government press conferences and, if the government didn't like what an organization was saying, the government would stop inviting those journalists to those press conferences. There's a whole book about it, it's called Manufacturing Consent. That type of information control is no longer possible now that everyone can livestream from their phones to millions of people and the establishment is mad about it. Now they are trying to wrestle back control of information by writing think pieces about the dangers of "algorithms" and threatening tech giants with anti-trust action.

Its ironic because I feel like these people are the reason social media is a threat to society. They want to use it to manipulate the public like they always have and are willing to go to great lengths to do so.

I didn’t know that being concerned about the impact of social media was strictly a liberal position.