What Facebook Did to American Democracy

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-facebook-did/542502/

by nikochiko • 6 years ago

7 1 6 years ago

Facebook certainly pushed a deeper wedge between the two sides and more easily allowed "bullshit" to pass as news, but come on... The crack down the middle of America was visible in every newspaper and news channel more than 20 years ago. Visiting the US in 2000 I was astonished to see how brazenly one-sided each "news" vendor was, and how much of it was just opinion, instead of fact. The echo chamber already existed, Facebook just amplified it and allowed the opinions that were passed up as news to drift further towards "total bullshit". US media destroyed the average citizen's ability to think critically by making news tribal. Nobody actually wants the echo chamber, but it's like The Matrix - it's all around you, it imprisons your mind, but you can't even see it.

The divide is so deep that Republicans would vote Republican if the candidate was a rabid racoon. The Democrats have a different problem to face right now: they're in a purity spiral that forces woke politics onto any candidate they put up, so they end up parroting nonsense. They've gotten so bad that I, a left of center vegetarian environmentalist who believes in free health care and a social net, would back a "sane" Republican who wasn't a fucking loon, and who admitted that the vast majority of scientists were right about climate change.

What Facebook Did to American Democracy

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