The creation of micro-segmented online communities filled ever more extreme and provocative content is not an intended goal of the social media companies, but rather an *emergent effect* of social media algorithms optimized to capture as much user attention as possible.
it also seems that there was a prior state in which less extreme content was also satisfying on some level, why isn't this content being selected by the recommendation engines?
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there are probably numerous optima satisfying the maximsation problem, why is it that we end up stuck in the most socially destructive one?
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That's confirmation bias and the law of large numbers. You just haven't noticed all of the other non-socially destructive, yet still frothy, communities of Deaf Veteran Philatelists for Christ or whatever.
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but that's my point - why are we stuck at these optima *across the board*?
End of conversation
New conversation -
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Extremists and the content are in a symbiotic relationship. As the content gets more extreme, number of members of that group declines. The level of extremism and the number of members rise and fall respectively until maintains a self-sustaining equilibrium.
#researchprojectsThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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