Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

You aren’t the only one who remembers. But in that time it was a self-selecting process. The problem with “the algorithm”, as I see it, is not that it increases the baseline toxicity of your average internet fuckwad (though I do think the algorithm, by seeking to increase engagement, also normalises antisocial behaviour more than a regular internet forum by rewarding it with more exposure, and in a gamified way that causes others to model that antisocial behaviour). Instead, it seems to me that it does two uniquely harmful things.

First, it automatically funnels people into information silos which are increasingly deep and narrow. On the old internet, one could silo themselves only to a limited extent; it would still be necessary to regularly interact with more mainstream people and ideas. Now, the algorithm “helpfully” filters out anything it decides a person would not be interested in—like information which might challenge their world view in any meaningful way. In the past, it was necessary to engage with at least some outside influences, which helped to mediate people’s most extreme beliefs. Today, the algorithm successfully proxies those interactions through alternative sources which do the work of repackaging them in a way that is guaranteed to reinforce, rather than challenge, a person’s unrealistic world view.

Many of these information silos are also built at least in part from disinformation, and many people caught in them would have never been exposed to that disinformation in the absence of the algorithm promoting it to them. In the days of Usenet, a person would have to get a recommendation from another human participant, or they would have to actively seek something out, to be exposed to it. Those natural guardrails are gone. Now, an algorithm programmed to maximise engagement is in charge of deciding what people see every day, and it’s different for every person.

Second, the algorithm pushes content without appropriate shared cultural context into faces of many people who will then misunderstand it. We each exist in separate social contexts with in-jokes, shorthands for communication, etc., but the algorithm doesn’t care about any of that, it only cares for engagement. So you end up with today’s “internet winner” who made some dumb joke that only their friend group would really understand, and it blows up because to an outsider it looks awful. The algorithm amplifies this to the feeds of more people who don’t have an appropriate context, using the engagement metric to prioritise it over other more salient content. Now half the world is expressing outrage over a misunderstanding—one which would probably never have happened if not for the algorithm boosting the message.

Because there is no Planet B, it is impossible to say whether things would be where they are today if everything were the same except without the algorithmic feed. (And, of course, nothing happens in a vacuum; if our society were already working well for most people, there would not be so much toxicity for the algorithm to find and exploit.) Perhaps the current state of the world was an inevitability once every unhinged person could find 10,000 of their closest friends who also believe that pi is exactly 3, and the algorithm only accelerated this process. But the available body of research leads me to conclude, like the OP, that the algorithm is uniquely bad. I would go so far as to suggest it may be a Great Filter level threat due to the way it enables widespread reality-splitting in a geographically dispersed way. (And if not the recommendation algorithm on its own, certainly the one that is combined with an LLM.)

That and the fact that money and media presence is essentially what wins elections. The only way we can really have democracy is with a truly informed populace and the only way people can make a truly informed vote without all the noise is to have anonymous voting. By which I mean you do not know which politician/party you are voting for, you just know the policies they have promised to enforce.

Further to that, there needs to be accountability. Right now, in the UK at least, governments are not held to account, at all. They get into office with grand promises of flying elephants and golden egg laying geese but obviously never follow through with said promises. The populace, ultimately, just shrugs it off with ‘politicians lie’ and continue complaining about it within their social circles.

Our political systems are fundamentally broken. We shouldn’t care if policies are from party A or party B. All that should matter is the content of the policy and whether it is ever actually materialised.

Right now we have a situation where people are manipulated left, right and centre into believing a given party’s absolute BS manifesto which they write under the full knowledge that not delivering will have very little impact on them as they’ve just had a substantial amount of time getting paid lucrative salaries to essentially argue with a bunch of other liars in a shouting match on tele.

Remove the football-esque fandom which applies to political parties by removing any ability to publicly affiliate any given person with said party and I’d bet we see different results across the bar. Remove all this absolute nonsense of politicians promoting their ideologies on TV/Twotter etc and you will remove a lot of the brainwashing which happens. Remove the most corrupt situation of all: private firms and individuals being able to fund political parties and you level the playing field.

Obviously this is a hard pill for many to swallow as no one likes to be told they’ve essentially been brainwashed into their thoughts and ego is everything in modern society.

I’m not sure that’s especially new. In the 1990s, we had Japanophiles, in the US. Right now, Korea is taking the crown. We’ll have to see who’s next. Might be China, but their culture is so controlled, that it might not happen. Russia was starting to have a lot of cultural influence, until Iron Curtain 2.0 slammed down.

Viral culture requires a certain amount of freedom of expression, along with access to media.

>and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism

The concept is called "yellow journalism" and extends basically to the days of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Modern culture has poured gasoline on this but it's existed forever.

I think the issue is that we have scaled groupthink--people now engage in circular conversations that reinforce nonsensical beliefs. Where as they might have historically encountered 1 or 2 people that agreed with crazy or inaccurate notions and most of their environment would likely push back on outrageous ideas.

Now, you can find 1000s of people that not only agree, but reinforce biases with other facts, perceptions.

While I agree they're a pain, you need only look at the long list of experiments that happened prior that were used as a justification for why we need this regulation, and why it was implemented with very little resistance.