It’s more than just spreading rumors. Rumors have been spread for millenia, and democracy made it through OK.
The difference is that the social media companies have a much broader reach than any sort of media congglamerate that came before it, and value engagement and attention above everything else. They understand that rumors generate attention, and their algorithmic feeds are designed to put whatever will generate more engagement in front of you.
I wonder how much damage media titans like Hearst would have done today if they built their empires now, on top of social media feeds, instead of in print 125 years ago…
Rumors have been spreading for a millennium, and democracy has been okay in the sense that democracy has only been a thing relatively recently. Social media didn’t exist 1,000 years ago as a means to spread rumors at scale to hundreds of millions of people.
Something that was said decades ago is that every village used to have an idiot. Now every idiot has a village.
And even more so now, the efforts of one person to sway public opinion can push lies to hundreds of millions of people, which is something that has been impossible up till now.
Rumors? That’s a funny way of spelling propaganda.
It also includes trolling and people that are just plain wrong, but people tend to believe what they want to believe.
Oh, it “harms democracy”, doesn’t it? How about this headline: social media fuels a genocide by spreading rumors, Myanmar finds. But alas, that was 2017 and only brown people getting harmed in some far-away place, so it’s old news and nothing to hold Facebook accountable for, eh?
What about anything you said refutes the point?
they’re being facetious lol
That’s a bad headline, Reuters. Surveys don’t show how things work; they show what people think. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if it was true that social media was bad for democracy, but this isn’t enough to say that’s the case.
Well, if they were surveying the prevalence of the rumors, then the survey could show how they spread. But it’s not what they did. As you described, it’s a survey about people believing how social media harms democracy.
No source linked, so that’s just a rumor spread by reuters.
Is the study they are referring to
Well I didn’t vote for Reuters
News came before the internet, so they state sources, not link them, which they did in the first sentence:
Oct 1 (Reuters) - A growing number of people think social media manipulates and divides people and harms democracy, Pew Research Center said on Thursday
The point of a sarcastic comment like mine, is to shame reuters for their shitty behavior, that has fallen behind the times.
As the other commenter has demonstrated, finding the study is easy. For everyone, including reuters. The reason they don’t link them is cultural, they are so arrogant to believe they don’t have to. Which pisses me off and sarcasm and ridiculing them is the only tool available to me to maybe make them stop eventually.
Honestly, it’s kind of a wild claim to be seen in 2026, when, nearly over a decade ago, Facebook was abusing this exact thing and optimizing their social media algorithms specifically to manipulate and divide people because it increased engagement.
And here we are, seemingly having forgotten the past, which is barely even history at this point, and are finding ourselves surprised that the exact thing that was being built has the exact effect that it was being built to create.
Even more astonishing is the number of people in this comment section either arguing against that or refuting it.
They also spread the truth as well even when government and media have conspired to obscure it. Social media has led to people beating companies, governments and politicians simply by providing an avenue to share reality. Social media defends democracy and protects democracy. There has always been an enormous power balance issues between the elites and the peasants and social media for the first time is allowing the peasants to speak to each other rather than the only voice being the elites through their media platforms.
My guy… Social media ARE the elites media platforms you Dingus.
They aren’t letting people do shit, they are all censored and monitored to ensure we stay fractured and disengaged
He seems stuck at what social media was in 2012 and hasn’t realized how they are now.
Yet in principle the social benefit described (amplifying voices of the unheard) isn’t entirely out of reach for social media as a category, especially if we can escape the era of closed platforms. Open alternatives are still relatively new. There is a plausible future in which closed platforms are left behind and we become much more capable of keeping mass public manipulation in check.
Exactly but I think for most people social media = the ones used by the masses, the “social normiedia”, like Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter = Arab Spring because it lets them use cheap SMS flipphones!
Now that Saudi Arabia basically owns Twitter that will never happen again. Not to mention when they hacked in ~10 years ago to get data on dissidents.
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Alternative Social Media like mastodon or Bluesky are also pretty fractured
They did. That’s why they spent so much effort to ruin the internet these past few years.
for the first time is allowing the peasants to speak to each other rather
That’s what the tavern was for…
You know, the place where the elites couldn’t manipulate the topics of conversation and shared sentiment by adjusting algorithms and shadowbanning ideas they don’t like…
Your main point might hold if people were mostly using fediverse platforms, but such is not the case
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Not more than lobbies and billionaires
And by extension the bastardization and gutting of basic education. People who aren’t taught how to think won’t understand things.
Don’t worry, I’m sure AI is going to make that all better, right? Right?
Oh yes they do, as a multiplicator of everything that lobbies and billionaires say and do.
It’s literally one of the things that gives lobbies and billionaires the level of control that they have.
Why do you think they managed to keep growing and maintaining control? It’s because everyone else is going at each other’s throats over artificially created cultural issues in an ever-ongoing culture war, largely fueled by these people and spread and scaled over social media.
Social media is literally the weapon they use, and almost no one has any idea of the level of manipulation they are subject to through their feeds.
The biggest perpetrators of misinformation are the MSM. Without social media a lot of what is going on in the world will never see the light of day.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/09/13/social-media-misinformation-doxxing-privacy-laws/
https://jacobin.nl/hoe-de-nederlandse-media-een-illegale-oorlog-verkopen/
How is this news? Breaking news, warm water is wet !
Pssst 🤫, you are harming democracy by spreading rumors via this social media platform.
It spreads blatant lies. Not all rumors are lies, though.
That’s the point. Rumors are, in many ways, more dangerous than lies, since they mix in with the truth in ways that make them more believable.
Greta Hopkins ruined my small village by spreading rumours. There was no survey, if you knew Greta, you knew it was her.
I love the quiet irony you employed here. I know nothing about Greta Hopkins other than she’s a village-ruining whore who should suffer for all the pain she’s caused!
I don’t know her, I don’t know the village, and I don’t know you, but that bitch needs to go down. Thanks, social media!
Nice! I like the cut of your jib!
And the biggest lie they spread is that social media is good for democracy.
as opposed to established media, which is totally trustworthy and not captured. not at all.
You don’t say. Who would have thunk?
I really do think we could neuter social media’s harm by requiring them to positively identify users as actual people or own the consequences of what gets posted - like how a newspaper has the legal accountability for what it says. This “neutral platform” is not healthy for our democracy.
I’m all for freedom of speech - but I don’t think those freedom of speech laws had anticipated how wide the damage of speech can flow and how stealthily things can be spoken. Is “freedom of speech” the same as “freedom to amplify anonymous voices to millions, with someone else choosing what voice to amplify”?
And it’s not hard to set up. The EU’s new identity network requires zero-knowledge-proofs - ie “this is a real person” is all that social media platforms would be able to verify. I’d obviously be deeply against the social media companies being able to positively identify users.
But I usually get downvoted to oblivion for making this point.
