Mustrum_Ridcully
Legend
You mention a lot of good points. I kinda mostly look at the first when I think about it:I do brand training for an ambassador group of thousands, and there's also a few other things going on that get people to fall into this trap:
Add all this up, and the only ones who benefit are those who are there to make money off of the rest of us. Social media's supposed convenience and value to average users is heavily favoring bots, provocateurs, and bad actors. It's why moderated platforms are so important (EN World) and why LinkedIn finally put a stake in the ground and is asking for license/government ID to prove who you say you are.
- Top-to-bottom scrolling. We don't even realize the algorithm is deciding what we see, and it is not by importance, or relevance, or anything else, it's by monetization, and therefore it's not actually curated in any way that is beneficial to us, it's already biased to the platform -- but it's invisible. You don't even know what you're missing.
- Shared spaces. Facebook in particular is guilty of blurring the lines between your personal page, a friend's page, a brand page, an ad, and a group. This is on purpose so that you don't stay in one bubble for long. However, it means many people actually have no idea who sees their posts, and there is a high number of users who aren't educated enough to know how it works (I'm always amused by spouses tagging their partners on things that we all have no business knowing about).
- Smart phones. Social media requires attention to use it correctly. The Atlantic recently shared an article where the elderly find it nearly impossible to keep track of all the updates, scrolling, changes, "improvements" to the platform, etc. Users who ONLY use phones cannot see pictures very well and are unlikely to read more than a few sentences. Social media wants their "strafing" level of engagement but not actual long-form conversations.
- Anonymity. There is no account police. There is no hashtag police. You can make multiple fake accounts all the live long day on most platforms without consequence. There is no authority of any kind ensuring social media is used in any way that's appropriate, appeals to authority are to an anonymous feedback form completely disconnected from real humans.
The way media is presented to us is now chosen by engagement, as you mention. And that might be good for the platform, but not good for us.
I have some hope that this is something governments in the world will really have to look into - making up rules about how social media algorithm work, how transparent and comprehensible they are to users, and provide some sort of guidelines. (This isn't really easy, because, for example, Google at least to put a lot of effort into making its Algorithm actually provide relevant search and had to fight search engine optimziation by spammers and malware producers.)
Facebook basically started with the idea of showing you the posts of your friends. This could be about your favorite hobby, their dog, their last meal, their political opinion, or whatever. But it were people you actively decided to follow, eventually expanded by organizations and media sources you might be interested in. Maybe you created groups of like-minded people. But at some point we lost control over what we are presented, some algorithm is picking for us to the benefits of the social media corporation and its advertisers (and maybe investors). We don't notice so easily, because a lot of is manipulative - it engages us emotionally, even if it's actually naughty word or at least distorted, in ways that maybe our father's talk about his sports team or our sister's talk about her dog wasn't. But the latter was actually still keeping us in contact with people we cared about and knew existed and even knew a tleast a little bit about how they are in real life, heck, we could probably even check out whether that sports team actually performed as described and how the dog is doing. But now we have no idea who the people talking are, they might not even be real and just bots created to parrot something.