Social Media: Time for a Break? - AACE
The problem is not the Internet or social media in a broad sense but rather specifically the use of the algorithms. When Google and Facebook and others went to the advertising business model anytime anybody did anything, anytime anybody connected with somebody else it was financed by third party whose motivation was to manipulate what happened. Then the whole business model was about how to manipulate more and more. What that results in is people being directed rather than exploring and that makes the world small. That is fundamental. You cannot make these algorithms better. You can’t say we want a better form of constant incremental manipulation of every person. The whole concept from the start is poison (Lanier, 2021, Honestly Podcast).