what is Social Media doing to us?

In his note, Abramov, who’s worked at the social network for four years, compared Facebook to a nuclear power plant. Facebook, unlike traditional media sources, can generate “social energy” at a scale never seen before, he said.

“But even getting small details wrong can lead to disastrous consequences,” he wrote. “Social media has enough power to

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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.

Never before in history have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers. Humans evolved in small groups, defined by kinship: those we knew, knew us. And our imaginative capabilities allowed us to know strangers—kings and queens, heroes of legend, gods above—all manner of at least partly mythic personalities to whom we may have felt as... See more