How the polarizing effect of social media is speeding up

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/09/ [login to see] /facebook-twitter-youtube-instagram-tiktok-social-media
For many, checking social media has become a routine of logging on, seeing something that makes them angry or upset, and repeating that cycle ad infinitum.

If that feels true to you, it's not your imagination.

Max Fisher is a journalist who focuses on the impact of social media on global conflicts and our daily lives, and has covered it extensively for The New York Times.

In his new book, The Chaos Machine, Fisher details how the polarizing effect of social media is speeding up. He joined All Things Considered to talk about why tech companies benefit from this outrage, and the danger it could pose to society.

"Remember that the number of seconds in your day never changes. The amount of social media content competing for those seconds, however, doubles every year or so, depending on how you measure it. Imagine, for instance, that your network produces 200 posts a day of which you have time to read about 100. Because of the platform's tilt, you will see the most outraged half of your feed. Next year, when 200 doubles to 400, you will see the most outraged quarter, the year after that the most outraged eighth. Over time, your impression of your own community becomes radically more moralizing, aggrandizing, and outraged, and so do you, at the same time, less innately engaging forms of content. Truth appeals to the greater good, appeals to tolerance, become more and more outmatched, like stars over Times Square."

— An excerpt from The Chaos Machine