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The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What? (yewtu.be)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by Hirom@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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Social media divides us, makes us more extreme and less empathetic, it riles us up or sucks us into doom scrolling, making us stressed and depressed. It feels like we need to touch grass and escape to the real world.

New research shows that we might have largely misinterpreted why this is the case. It turns out that the social media internet may uniquely undermine the way our brains work but not in the way you think.

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[-] anothermember@beehaw.org 9 points 7 months ago

They've always been pretty transparent about that kind of thing though haven't they?

I don't think they're denying the filter bubble exists, just giving a different theory on why things have turned bad.

[-] huginn@feddit.it 6 points 6 months ago

The video pretty concisely summarizes the latest scientific findings which say that the filter bubble does less to radicalize people than being confronted with opposing beliefs.

They squarely blame algorithms pushing anger for their role in that extremism though.

[-] tesseract@beehaw.org 5 points 6 months ago

They haven't been completely honest about their funding and biases. Second, they are trying to say that it's human nature and not the filter bubble that's responsible for things going bad. But those are not independent things. The algorithms created the filter bubble because they are designed to exploit human nature in order to trap human attention. That filter bubble in turn affects human nature in a negative way to cause polarization.