I think it's a multi-faceted issue.
Today's platforms are less about engaging and more about driving traffic. That puts users into this weird position where we're expected to act as content creators who have to care about audience metrics, just to suit the very human need of social interaction. In our daily lives, we tend to be isolated to an extent, so the internet is a natural place to turn to for some kind of interaction.
And that used to work okay when social media was more about building a community and winning the majority of users. A platform dies without users who will authentically use the product.
Nowadays, though, with people acting as content creators, we have to fit into an algorithm-friendly niche, which is going to involve a lot of fudging the truth, pretending, and playing a character. Add in TikTok's known issue of having accounts that are quite literally actors playing a character that's a TikTok user in some weird marketing meta-narrative, and it's sort of a reality warping mess.
But it's a weird dynamic, because we're either content creators who are looking to get picked up by the algorithm and see our friends again oooor we're completely passive scrollers who expect relevant content to get downloaded to our skulls. No thinking about it and starting a conversation, just mindless consumption.
And if the algorithm pushes a certain topic, it's going to feed into our recency biases; the sheer repetition is going to make it seem bigger or more common than it is. Not that hate doesn't exist or isn't prevalent, but.... like, if people disconnect from TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr for 30 days, they tend to find themselves in a less reactive place, and I think that speaks to the effect these things have on people.
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