In Reply to: Brought up as kids or Social Media? posted by Bruinfan4ever on June 16, 2025 at 08:25:49
How a person is brought up plants the seed, if you will, and social media provides the fertilizer.
I'm a firm believer that our morality is downstream from our psychological make-up, and our politics are downstream from our morality. We can get into details at some point perhaps, but I see social media as mostly an amplifier since its algorithms are some combination of three things: (a) your interests, (b) your demographical data (whether provided by you or collected through some other means) and (c) what the company wants to push on you (that's where the recent tweak on the twitter algorithm to elevate blue ticks, or rather their change in policy wrt who gets the blue ticks, created a truly sh*tty experience). Outside of twitter, you can generally make up (c) by paying extra attention to (a). So I usually have a pleasant Youtube and Facebook streams because I generally try to interact with it positively (no hate watching or its equivalents).
Now take someone who already comes to social media with psychological wounds and questionable choices in morality ... this will lead to what we see. Take out social media component, the pathology is more manageable, generally hidden from the public and people can be socially well-adjusted, at least on the surface. Now crank that up an order of magnitude or two through social media, and their pathology can no longer be contained. Then you get what we get.
Just my personal take. This may or may not turn out to be true.