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As I often say, social media is a disease, and the first step is admitting you have a problem. However, we all disagree on what precisely the problem is.
linuxjournal.com/content/25-yea…
linuxjournal.com/content/25-yea…
2/ One of the problems is the filter bubble, where you surround yourself only with voices that agree with you.
3/ To be fair, there's little value in including ultrapartisan voices that disagree with you, like Hannity or Maddow. While they may occasionally have a useful alternative perspective, their hyperpartisanship causes most of their content to be of little use.
4/ But that points to the next problem: surrounding yourself with hyperpartisan garbage you agree with. In the Hannity vs. Maddow axis, you see one as the purveyor of lies, and the other as defender of the truth, when they are both pretty equivalent.
5/ This then leads to the next problem, that you see the complicated debates that confront us as black and white, rather than shades of grey. There's always more nuance to every major debate, if your Twitter timeline is black and white, you are living in a bubble.
6/ For example, the last podcast I listened to while on last night's walk was Lawfare discussing the Barr summary of the Mueller report. Yes, they are anti-Trump, but at least they delve into the nuance, often defending Trump/Barr's position.
7/ But I don't see people retweeting Lawfare's articles/podcasts on the issue, I see people retweeting Hannity and Maddow, which are laughably devoid of any serious content, only hyperpartisanship.
8/ Reasonable people disagree. There are reasonable people on both sides of the major issues that divide us. However, most content I see on social media is about proving how the opposing side is unreasonable.
9/ The "strawman" fallacy is the most prevalent one on social media, where you frame the opponent's argument in a way that makes them seem the most unreasonable, the easiest to argue against.
10/ If, for a major issue, you can't answer the question "what are some reasonable arguments/concerns on the opposing side?", then you have a problem, having cut yourself off from those opposing arguments.
11/ I say "concerns" because it often isn't a matter of "arguments". For example, the core "anti-vax" argument is complete nonsense, but yet they still have a lot of valid concerns, such as whether government can force vaccines against our will.
12/ An insightful point:
