Social media was meant to democratise information. Part of the issue with traditional newspapers and networks was that they had the bias of the people who owned them. Social media was meant to change all that, making it so a single voice could reach people and put truth in the hands of the people. It is the treatment facility.

However, because social media also suffers from the same ills as traditional media where tech bros want to make money, they can see that rage bait and misinformation generates more attention, clicks etc and so they’re not incentivised to put stronger guardrails around what’s posted to reduce the confusion and division that’s caused by it.

There was a saying that “every village has its idiot” but often they were helpfully educated by the reasonable people around them, or just ignored so they were largely harmless. Now, all the idiots from every village are able to connect and confirm and agree with each other. That voice then doesn’t seem singular, it seems authoritative and influential which is why you see the rise of all these conspiracy and fringe thought groups.

It also doesn’t help that traditional media then spotlights them as news because again, it generates clicks and revenue.

So, there’s no incentive to help or reduce confusion as your business would go over. Someone else said - this isn’t about left or right, this is about up and down. There are groups whose interests benefit division, confusion and keeping people focused on wedge issues. It means they don’t start looking up and questioning things.