> Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media environment?
Perhaps America is a bigger target than other countries for foreign influence operations that seek to cause division and depression using social media.
This and this again. Tiktok is a foreign influence machine on its own and it is wrecking havoc across the West. Compare Western Tiktok to Chinese Tiktok and see the difference for yourself.
Let's also take Facebook and Instagram down, though.
Bad propaganda from China that makes our kids depressed is as bad as the same bad propaganda from an American company. And Facebook stopped being a place to make friends a long time ago.
Perhaps America was a uniquely divided society from the very beginning? Either that, or foreign influence operations have been a multigenerational affairs - which year or decade could one say America was not divided?
To double down: chattel slavery, the expansion west by conquest, a civil war, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps are not the ingredients of a cohesive society. The fault lines in American society were not imposed from the outside. There was never a point when the US was egalitarian in practice.
Perhaps America is a bigger target than other countries for foreign influence operations that seek to cause division and depression using social media.