With all due respect to @JonHaidt, I increasingly suspect that pieces like this really aren’t about how social media corrupt society, but rather a projection of increasing confusion and frustration within the elite onto society. Short 🧵 1/7 theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
First, romanticism about the “early” Internet or social media in the early 00s overlooks how elitist the early Internet was. Large parts of the population simply weren’t online. There was a notable class divide in Internet access. 2/7 pewresearch.org/internet/2015/…
Second, accounts focusing on how social media make politics stupider often overlook how politics is only a tiny, tiny fraction of what the average social media user consumes online. If you consume a lot of politics on Twitter, you are the outlier! 3/7 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
Third, if we ask social media users how they enjoy their use experience, they usually enjoy it quite a bit, thank you very much. Because to them, it is not about politics, but instead about friends, hobbies, fun,… The elite’s social media experience is very different. 4/7 
So in the late 00s, the unwashed masses conquered the Internet/social media… to have fun with their friends 🤷♂️ To understand what broke our public discourse, maybe the elite should start looking closer to home instead of projecting their weird use experience onto society? 5/7
Analyses jumping from “people enjoy sharing cat pics on Insta” to “democracy in peril” leave out a huge party of the story. Note that @mgurri’s account of how social media undermine trust in elite institutions rests primarily on “more transparency”🫣 6/7 vox.com/platform/amp/f…
So rather than racking our brains seeking tweaks to the social media experience of the average user, we might want to think more about why the elite is having such a terrible time on Twitter and can’t stop making a fool of itself in the eye of the public? #StopProjecting 7/7
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