No Stupid Questions

the ones who own the social media are the source of so many problems.

It's not social media, it's the algorithms that drives engagement for ... profit. "Number must go up." "The more users the more we can sell ourselves to VCs for."

That's why Fediverse is so important. We keep the social, but leave the negative effects behind. Feel free to click on a ragebait title here without your whole feed suddenly being steered in that direction.

Well, that you think about it easily places you in a different group then the average joes. Most people don't think about anything that's not relevant to their survival.

We haven't really evolved that much in the last few millennia where our civilization started, millennia is a really small scale for evolution.

And for people like that (the majority), social media are a bane, because they abuse what we know about human mind to be es engageable as possible, even if it's not beneficial to the human.

Social media as a concept is not the problem, the execution is.

Most people simply don't care about abstract issues like social media and similar.

In my opinion it ties into Dunbar's number or the monkey sphere, where humans simply cannot be that well connected without it ultimately becoming a disaster.

The human mind just isn't as evolved as everyone thinks it is and is built on a design that was about survival of you and your tribe.

I usually start from this point and then add in the billionaires and corporations that have learnt how to manipulate these instincts for their own gain.

You'll find this in many places that people would rather blame the world en lieu of looking inward. It's a sad thing, as the latter is where one has most effect.

Social media, like most things in life, has its good and bad sides. Places like twitter and Facebook have definitely been moved to the "bad" side of things through the use of an algorithm to curate the user's experience and steer them towards socially harmful content. It's much more difficult to do this on federated SM because anti social messaging doesn't get amplified.

It's not a panacea, and there will be attempts to corrupt it, but federated SM does give me hope that we can escape the rabbit hole of billionaire bro psychopaths.

Are social media the root of all problems? No. Do they have a significant influence? Yes.

You mentioned spineless billionaires who eff around. There are instances of real harm. There is bullying (everywhere), there are schemes to make groups depressed (teenage girls on Insta), there is a lack of moderators that lead to genocide (Myanmar). These things deserve to be looked at by legislators when the sycophants don't do it by themselves.

Social media addiction is a thing as well. Addictions in young people are bad. Parents should be on the front line of this. But that does not absolve social media companies from taking measures to curb certain excesses. Tobacco companies are not allowed to advertize to toddlers either.

So saying they're just a tool, like, say, a hammer is insincere. You can use a hammer to cause real harm. You can deploy social media to cause real harm.

One of the greatest issues of social media is scale. People on the fringes of society who would be largely outcast in their communities can group and organize with much more ease. In the past, this was limited to the pub in three sheets to the wind discussions. Now you get sh!t like Q Anon, flatearthers, vax nuts, etc. - stuff that common sense in smaller communities would have moderated or stamped out now gets mass appeal. They seem much bigger as an online presence than they often are. But they get dedicated believers to start shooting.

The introduction of the internet has been compared to the introduction of the printing press in Europe. Both events caused a quantum leap in the dissemination of information with profound influences on society. After the printing press we got a century and a half of conflicts and wars. We'll be well off if all we get here is a century of people typing in caps lock at each other.

We limit things in society. The availability of nicotine products, alcohol, the ability to drive, the availability of weaponry, antitrust laws, environmental protections, etc. I think we will not get past regulating social media somehow. By which I mean I don't know how either.

One thing that is certain will benefit society is investing in education, teaching media savvy-ness to young children and all adults if possible, giving them the tools to sort the relevant from the distorted. We are largely unprepared for this and I include myself here having grown up with papers and landlines. But education is the saddest item in any budget, as the costs are high and the results take a generation to bear fruit.

Trump wants to dismantle the DOE...

No, I don't think it's exaggerated.

Have you ever unplugged? If not, you simply have no possible frame of reference; you really want to find your answer, that's how.

Yes, social media is the problem. But there are two social media spheres. The one where we are, with Lemmy and Mastodon, is not the problem. The problem is the social media that exists in the capitalist world. What happened with the internet is that we invented a lot of services that should be a human right but they are controlled by corporations. Everyone should have access to a zero knowledge email, everyone should have access to a social media platform that is not controlled by anyone (it's a public space).

The issue is not necessarily social media as a concept its how social media interacts with the profit motive to encourage addiction and hate. It is silly to blame the tool which why I blame the capitalists who have nearly monopolized ownership of the tool and use it to divide us.