I wonder how true that is.
In my gut I think social media is harmful everywhere but if certain countries really are weaponizing it...
All media is propaganda. We overuse this word without thought given to context. Every piece of media is meant to persuade because it's coming from the perspective of the producer. Even if it's an attempt to be unbiased, we're going by that producer's interpretation of what unbiased is. Even ass shaking videos are propaganda despite there not being an overt political message; it's communicating what's attractive to the general public which can be interpreted as propaganda. Which clearly we see the effect that this is having on adolescent women and up.
So consequently by the format that media is consumed and the algorithm used to queue up those pieces of biased media, it can take consumers down a rabbit hole of detrimental perception.
By no means am I saying we should be as censored or vanilla as China, but we've had 20 years worth of data to study. It's fukking up people's lives.
To paraphrase a south African fakkit who really has insidious motivation wrapped in thought provoking freedom of speech and expression, I think we do need more free speech and expression.
I think two simple changes could reconcile a lot of the damage being done; "autoplay" should be outlawed and timelines should be sequential. Users can build their own playlists, but autoplay needs to be barred. It compounds negative effects. At the very least, without autoplay users have to do their own searching and will organically run into media that challenges their ideas (think south African fakkit's "more speech" statement). We have to mitigate the algorithms effects as much as possible.
