And yes, I’m aware of the irony of posting this on social media, but I truly think that it is an awful thing that has happened humanity.
And to be absolutely clear, I do acknowledge that there are benefits: it allows people who are distant to remain in touch, for example. Or it can be used to put out critical information (think COVID-19 for example).
But let’s face it — there’s another face to it also, one that brings out the worst of humanity. How far do you have to scroll on any platform before you find toxicity? Divisive, inflammatory comments that bring out the absolute worst in us. All because people have different opinions on any topic (the problem of course is not in people having different opinions, but in giving the masses the means to express their differing opinions is really what leads to too many civilised conversations descending into barbaric insults and word slinging. Try as hard as you like to disengage, friction will always produce heat.)
Moreover, how much misinformation has been spread on social media platforms over the years? I don’t think I need to say much more about that.
And to be clear: I’m not saying these issues and others are exclusive to social media — they certainly existed long before, perhaps even as early as when man first learned to communicate with one another — but the creation of social media is possibly the biggest chunk of fuel on the fire of discord, and regardless of where you go — whether it be Facebook, or Reddit, or Snapchat, or twitter, or YouTube, or Lemmy, or text messaging, or internet forums, or whatever other platforms exist out there, you will not find a platform that is not plagued — nay, riddled — with such awfulness. And no, I’m absolutely not saying that I myself have not played my fair part in toxicity because I have, but I’m willing to admit it. Are you?
I think anonymous social media reveals a part of us that is almost always concealed, in "polite" society, on a grand scale. Some of it is ugly, but that ugliness has always been there, we've just always masked it for the sake of getting along with our peers. We have always had these masks, and we've always had dark corners of the world where we can take them off and revel in the petty villainy of unconstrained self-interest. Anonymous writings, secret societies, and the like. Now we have a (relatively) very densely networked place where we can all take off the polite mask and spread that petty villainy across the globe in seconds.
I think social media is a mirror of that human inclination to indulge in selfish or sometimes even spiteful behavior that might otherwise be constrained by shame, or politeness, or other societal norms. It's very weird, and not always bad. More to the point, it's always been there. It changes and mutates in novel ways in this medium, and I think there's an accelerating, feedback-loop-y effect when you find an online peer group that normalizes misanthropy that we haven't really been able to see at this scale before the internet, c.f. 4chan and its ilk. It is dangerous, and it does get people killed.
I don't think it's awful. I think it's complicated and has some awful effects, but I think the larger part of my discomfort with social media is the notion that we have always been like this, it's only now that we can see it as clearly as we do. Our communications technology is now at a stage where the worst person in the world, whoever that is, can get on a forum and start blasting the planet with whatever thoughts cross their mind. That is very new, and I think we are still very much in the adjustment period of dealing with that reality. It's overwhelming.
Or to put it another way: social media brings out the very best and the very worst of humanity, and makes them all instantly accessible to everyone with the kit to interpret them. That's very cool, but it also means that we all have to come face-to-face (so to speak) with the worst of humanity, and, oh boy, is it bad. I think it's worth it though. I'd rather see the worst of humanity than be ignorant of it. We can't fix problems we can't see.
EDIT:
P.S.
I think it's worth keeping in mind that social media as it exists today, in 2026, is heavily manipulated by those who stand to profit from disharmony among people. I'm not just talking about corporate controlled social media like Meta's holdings or Discord. Corporate social media exists, and evolves, to find and exploit any and all avenues of power, and pitting less-powerful people against one another has been used to maintain power since time immemorial. It will always do that, but that threat also exists on non-corporate social media too. There are people in the Fediverse whose job it is to cause people to hate others, to despair of any hope of cooperation or even of coexistence, to see no hope for a better future. I think we all know of some of them, but I think we would all benefit from keeping in mind that even the wisest and savviest among us can sometimes fall prey to these people, to our own detriment. And the better we all become at doing this, and helping others do this, the less awful social media will be.
Meta is pissing me off rn
Meta is awful. I think Facebook is the clearest contemporary example of a part of the internet that is dead or nearly so, in the Dead Internet Theory sense of the word. The people who only use the internet to access Meta resources have a very skewed sense of reality. I think; it's rather hard to get good data on that part of the internet :(
Meta had potential, and they squandered it. Just like so many others. Social media down the drain.
Worse; I think they did the opposite of squander it. They monetized it. It followed (and re-entrenched) the tech startup enshittification path of
make (or buy) cool thing -> attract users -> isolate users -> extract value from users (by making the cool thing shittier) as long as possible. The reason Zuck is a billionaire is that he executed the plan very well.Good flow!
This is excellently written. Great observations.
Deserves to be saved. Well done!
TYVM ❤️