It’s important to note that this isn’t a hunch. This has been studied and proven. We know this is happening and nobody is doing anything on a political level to stop it.

I’ve been following the German election campaign very closely and the only time social media was even mentioned was when a young lady in one of the town hall formats asked if there were any plans to deal with the danger of social media in the context of impact on young people’s development. The question was put to Alice Weidel. Her answer was basically “No idea. I haven’t dealt with it yet”.

That was it. Otherwise, the topic wasn’t even mentioned in any discussion round.

But every single discussion round opened with “the topic that every German is talking about”: migration migration migration migration. Wonder why everybody is talking about that?

I would like to emphasize this sentence from the article because it is simply true:

What we do in these next few months will determine whether Europe’s liberal democracy survives or is lost for ever.

Something has to happen NOW, but nobody is talking about it. It’s really exasperating.

In Europe we have public news broadcasters in every country, so relying on corporate news isn’t a huge problem.

Anyway, a news outlet pushing propaganda and misinformation is not nearly as dangerous as a social media platform doing it via algorithm. The fact that the algorithm can give you exactly the kind of propaganda that will resonate with you is extremely dangerous.

Not saying privately owned news outlets with a huge reach aren’t a problem, they definetely are, it’s just a whole other dimension.

Corellation is not causation but in this case it is very suspicious and studies like these show that there might be causation That’s why I said it’s not proof but needs to be studied further.

And yes, of course I mean centralized, profit driven social media. But that is the overwhelming majority of social media.

Well put, this is exactly the problem. I remember the early days of facebook, twitter and instagram when there were no algorithms and your feed was just posts by people you follow in chronological order. Discourse was much more tame back then. We urgently need stricter laws that regulate these algorithms.

I’m glad this is finally being looked at because I’ve been saying this for years and I feel like the vast majority doesn’t realize how bad this is.

If you look at social media use and the rise of the far right over the last 15 years, they pretty much go hand in hand. Sure, that isn’t proof for anything, but it’s alarming and needs to be studied further.

In Germany, we have safeguards that prevent a single media outlet to gain too much power over controlling the public opinion. We have this for TV stations, news papers etc. Just not social media. Because social media wasn’t even on the horizon when this law was put in place.

I think it’s insane that we just let foreign profit driven companies steer the public opinion and discourse in our society and we finally have to start to heavily regulate them.

My first thought that he put some really bad makeup on his hand…

True. We had a pretty big storm here a couple of years ago and the next day the supermarket shelves were almost empty. We really don’t usually think about how fragile the supply chain is when it comes to a crisis.