All about social networks

Zuckerberg’s social-media-shaped public does not turn around Zuckerberg in the same way. But even so, Zuckerberg is reshaping the algorithms so that some aspects of the public - in particular hostility to immigration, to women and to sexual minorities - will likely come to the fore, while others will recede. The extent to which this reflects his ch... See more

Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it , making it more likely that we end up in the one situation rather than the other. As you have surely guessed by now, I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. Many of the probl... See more

So what can we do to ameliorate this problem? Making individuals better at thinking and seeing the blind spots in their own individual reasoning will only go so far. What we need are better collective means of thinking. As Hugo, Melissa and I argue here (academic article, but I think fairly readable), much of the work on human cognitive bias sugges... See more

We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation - that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is ... See more