I'd like to maybe add onto that with a personal anecdote regarding twitter:
I've never used it and had an account created from about a decade ago. The only people I had followed when I first created the account were a few random celebrities and public figures. I pretty much never logged in despite many emails from Twitter to remind me of my account. A few months ago I opened it up to look, and I was really shocked and appalled at what I saw. My reaction to it was quite visceral. The best way I can describe the content I saw is just "hate", not the general term hate-speech that people throw around, but rather just people tweeting hateful things and exhibiting what appeared to me to be their hatred over something or someone.
Sure in between all of that there were a few wholesome tweets of course. But for the most part, it was just hate. I didn't really stick around too much other than to maybe add some additional public personas I do follow (I guess in support of them). The whole experience left me with the impression that Twitter and perhaps social-media entirely, are really bad/toxic/divisive to our society, at least in their current form.
I think Twitter is especially bad in comparison to other sites because it incentivizes people to post their real names, photos of themselves, etc. Even worse for this issue is the ability to retweet, and the trending page of Twitter. Instagram for comparison doesn't have this problem to the same extent because it's about sharing photos and not about following every new trend. This design gives those that live their lives as online reactionaries a 24/7 outrage factory. The trending page is a constant line of pitchforks and threads to bring them to. Regardless of the benefits of the service I think it's hard to deny how the site's design contributes to the problem, at least to some degree.
I've never used it and had an account created from about a decade ago. The only people I had followed when I first created the account were a few random celebrities and public figures. I pretty much never logged in despite many emails from Twitter to remind me of my account. A few months ago I opened it up to look, and I was really shocked and appalled at what I saw. My reaction to it was quite visceral. The best way I can describe the content I saw is just "hate", not the general term hate-speech that people throw around, but rather just people tweeting hateful things and exhibiting what appeared to me to be their hatred over something or someone.
Sure in between all of that there were a few wholesome tweets of course. But for the most part, it was just hate. I didn't really stick around too much other than to maybe add some additional public personas I do follow (I guess in support of them). The whole experience left me with the impression that Twitter and perhaps social-media entirely, are really bad/toxic/divisive to our society, at least in their current form.