I am about up to my neck now of people scapegoating social media as a concept, to excuse themselves from their shitty behavior. Because I sincerely doubt that malicious intent, misinformation and this overwhelming level of ‘toxicity’ was the core design of every social media platform in their humble beginnings.
I have been online long enough to know, that from BBS Boards to IRC Servers to Yahoo/AOL Chat Rooms to MySpace to Facebook that people who have registered onto those places, have always taken their collective dumps in them. And never owing to them so it must all be because these places just exist, right?
Wrong.
The smaller and more fringe the networks the “realer” people are in my experience.
Probably because a lot of the “people” in the larger networks are literally not “real”. Many of them are secretly bots, and a lot of the rest are either sock puppets or meat puppets