The Dark Side of Social Media - Most people would claim that they don't have time for investigative journalism. But when you think about it, investigative journalists really perform a service for us. They look up the material, and hopefully present it in a digestible form. It saves us a lot of work and time.

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But...

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Enter social media. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to become distracted. In fact, it is evolutionarily advantageous for us to be easily distracted by sounds and sights. A distraction can become an awareness of something very dangerous in our midst. Actually paying attention, on the other hand, is much more challenging.

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Nowadays, tech companies have learned how to exploit distraction. Cleverly, they have engineered algorithms that spot distraction, and then they feed us similar content. They want to know what attracts our attention. Over time, a computer profile becomes more and more clear (to the computer) and we are fed content that we truly believe is what we want to see. It's all automatic.

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Fully 70 percent of all content on Facebook and Youtube is generated by an algorithm to attract our attention. Eventually, we become siloed into a content world that we believe is truly our own. We do not suspect that it has been custom created for us. We, in fact, base our world view on much of this content.

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Investigative journalism requires reading, and most people won't even watch a short video on Facebook. People must move on to the next distraction. Pretty soon, investigative journalism (the good stuff) gets lost in the chaff of borderline content. The lines become blurred, and the next distraction arrives.

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Example: A woman who is newly pregnant and starts a search for how to make homemade baby food might see a suggestion on the right hand side of her YouTube feed for a video which turns out to be an anti vax video. It has been found that new mothers might also be interested in vaccine information. Pretty soon she goes down the anti vax rabbit hole and she's fed other conspiracy videos, chemtrails, and eventually Qanon.

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Politically left or right, it works the same way. We used to have a generally accepted world view in America. There were liberals and conservatives, but we could always sit down and have dinner together. We now have five or ten different world views, maybe more. Over a decade or two we have become very entrenched in our own little bunkers, and a willingness to even consider other points of view seem ludicrous. It's why we have trump, but it's also why we have defund the police.

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One must be aware that their social media feeds (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and others) exist to create profiles on individuals like us, and they also exist to keep you online to the maximum extent possible. You and I are the product being sold to companies that increasingly use targeted advertising. If you search for something on Amazon, you will later see ads on Facebook for similar products. Almost all apps and social media services are interlinked. The unforeseen side effect is the hyper polarization of America, and much of the free world. Social media exists to sell your profile to advertisers and to increase your time on social media. Many people check their cellphones and other devices 100 times per day, and they don't even know it.

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This is a critical problem. It is tearing apart the fabric of our social compact, and the structure of free societies.

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Awareness is not even half the battle. But I would suspect that most people are not even aware that they are being played like this. It's a big problem, and I don't have the solution.