has turned out to be a total cesspool.

Especially if they are poorly moderated which they usually are.

...at least Facebook has cat videos.

that FB employs and posseses that make it such a unique and massive threat. I would say the same for most major social media platforms, but FB is the grand old bull elephant of sociopolitical destruction.

Maybe to my regret....I've missed a lot of inter-family communications. But I have enough internet time wasters. (Looking at you DU).

Why would I argue?

make society worse, yes.

According to Facebook everybody but me is living a perfect life of loving relationships, financial success, joyful holidays and wonderful vacations.

I stopped posting in 2009 because I couldn’t keep up. But I did spend some lockdown time looking up people from my past. Everybody’s life is perfect. Didn’t expect that.

It's the users hat make for a poor experience of the tools

Interactive social media is the peoples media.

Corporate one way media has made society worse

It mainly depends on how you handle Facebook.

I am glad for FB for things that are highly personal, and allow me to be in contact with others who matter to me. How can I say this? When my son died more than four years ago, it was Facebook that got the news of his death to his friends. And enabled the planning of a memorial in his community.

Around 200 people came to that memorial. Most of them would not have even been aware of his death without FB. Honestly, it was a wonderful memorial. We held a raffle of his various possessions, which turned out to be joyous. His many t-shirts, most of which were from the various Ultimate Frisbee tournaments he attended, were well received.

Without Facebook, it would have been a vastly lot longer for his many friends to know he had died.

This is why I am a fan of FB.

Throughout history humans have been petty horrible. So we continue this trend. Facebook gives people an easy way to express their ignorant hate. These people otherwise would be too lazy to actually work to get out their message.

the black light you shine on the sofa that exposes all the nasty stuff, as John Fugelsang says. The Internet, in general, has been awful for decades. What one sees on Facebook today is no different than what we saw in the comments sections of articles on Yahoo! 25 years ago. It's why most sites that allow comments have moderators now. There will always be racists, misogynists, and bigots of every stripe, who will spout their hate wherever they can. It's easy when they can do it under the cover of anonymity that many outlets allow.

or at a minimum, hearing a human voice on the phone. It also binds people to very large corporations by having to pay big monthly phone/internet bills. In other words, people now have to pay a monthly bill for their emotional health.

Lack of touch and lack of seeing and talking to people in-person is very unhealthy for humans. Social media tends to minimize those things due to human laziness, ignorance and complacency.

I remember the days when people used their telephone mostly in brief conversations to set up direct human contacts and when we got to see our family and friends, our hearts were uplifted in ways that nothing else can.

KY

..or other people who's opinions you already know?

KY

a mirror or a magnifying lens to who people really are.

Some of them turned out to be horrible.

The more experience I have with social media, the more I realize our brains are being manipulated. Remember, all those algorithms are there to get the dopamine hits, ping the outrage and fear mechanisms, and generally create a generalized state of anxiety and tribalism.

We've made it very, very easy to form a mob mentality about things you wouldn't even think could generate it. The Internet could be a tool to become more informed and see many different perspectives. Instead, I find the more time people spend cocooned in social media among preferred groups, the less they actually know about things.

Studies are bearing this sort of thing out.

At least it's interesting reading.

It's the dopamine-feeding algorithms designed to keep people in information bubbles and to constantly feed their outrage.

They use AI to identify violators which calls into question their ability to monitor their site.

I'm isolating the political lies (although there are indeed many of them) and focusing on the more positive; The hobby-lovers, the sports-enthusiasts, the "Crocheting" groups, and any number of other isolated groups of people seeking like-minded interaction with those who share their passions.

Fully 60-75% of Americans don't give a single shit about politics or the lies we love to rail against, and that's nothing to be said about the rest of the world that uses Facebook. FB as a networking software has done wonders, and in many ways is the template for human interaction on the Net.


If people want to find something worth condemning, I can name twenty websites that have done -far worse- than Facebook, dating back as long as my semi-recent memory, where snuff films and pictures of violent death and radicalization have sustained themselves.

By comparison, Facebook is a godsend.

isolation and Balkanization of our society than so-called "Social Media". Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, et al