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GETTYSocial media’s great promise was to connect the world. Yet rather than aggregate the world into a single real-time firehose, social platforms have increasingly turned to algorithmic curation to hand-feed us a perfectly personalized filter that appeals to our most intimate and powerful interests, desires and fears.
In doing so, social media has been accused of destroying the serendipitous discovery of the traditional media era that helped us stumble upon new interests, creating filter bubbles that keep us walled within an echo chamber of things we engage with. Yet, perhaps most troubling, concerns are increasingly being raised about the nature of this echo chamber and whether instead of surrounding us with things we like and make us happy, those social algorithms are ensuring we are deluged with hate and our deepest and darkest fears in order to maintain us in a state of perpetual fear and anger that will maximize our likelihood of consuming and engaging with content and producing our own responses in turn.
Is there merit to these concerns?
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