The Washington Post asked six of their columnists to characterize the past
decade. Two particular quotations stood out for me.
From Dana Milbank:
The rise of social media — Facebook and Twitter — aggravated and
amplified the fissures [within America]. Though it gave voice to millions, it
proved ruinous to traditional media and, with it, any sense of a shared,
objective truth. It gave rise to demagoguery, gave an edge to authoritarianism
and its primary weapon, disinformation, and gave legitimacy and power to the
most extreme, hate-filled and paranoid elements of society.
From Molly Roberts:
[W]e soon found we weren’t only giving each other access to our photos
and thoughts, our likes and our loves. We were allowing the [social media] platforms
access to a whole mess more, and those platforms were letting third parties see
it, too. To maximize our engagement, those platforms played on the preferences
all our sharing revealed — which meant shoving inflammatory content in our
faces and shoving us into silos. All that connection ended up dividing us.
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