what is Social Media doing to us?

I believe that we can build something that offers people a chance to participate in these new types of experiences, punctuated by silence and other opportunities for reflection. And they must be offered—because they no longer emerge naturally in the world that we live in. In other words, people don’t naturally fall into them or opt-in to them. They... See more

Even the guy who invented the infinite scroll later regretted it. These interfaces are not designed to help you—swiping and scrolling are rarely the best ways to do anything. They aren’t designed to solve your problem, but actually aim to prevent closure, and create an illusion that there are still infinite choices available to you.

But an unbounded information landscape is not an unalloyed good. Because social media does not favor accuracy or balance or diversity. It favors clicks. The more engaging and enraging the content, the more clicks it receives.

From Bill Gates’ conversation with Trevor Noah on the What now? podcast, reflecting on social media and the Internet:

Our industry was very young and just incredibly fast moving, but it didn't have this, oh, this will be a tool for Holocaust denial or weird impacts. And the idea that it would directly be used for political influence, one country

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Yet, the hidden machinations behind everyone’s favorite social media and search platforms are engineered to exploit our primal instincts for validation, status, and mimetic desires (adopting or pursuing preferences and aspirations based on the influence of others rather than our intrinsic motivations), morphing into a manipulative force that feeds... See more