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Old 18 Sep 2021, 09:04 PM   #6
TenFour
Master of the @
 
Join Date: Feb 2017
Location: USA
Posts: 1,681
The biggest problem with Facebook is that a high percentage of people are not smart enough to discern what is bad information. Back in the era before social media this same phenomena was observed with the rise of cable television and organizations like Fox News. Suddenly, fringe ideas and outright misinformation gained widespread distribution and allowed people to avoid seeing the counter information that they would have seen if they read the newspaper or watched one of the major networks. Sure, traditional news outlets were never perfect and will never be, but they hired real journalists who studied how to research and write stories, and there was a big effort to tell the truth. Today's social media tries for engagement before anything else, no matter how ridiculous the story or idea. Unfortunately, there are lots of people who just lap this stuff up, fueling their prejudices and pre-conceived notions about the world. With Twitter you are able to avoid a lot of their desire to feed you only what is most outrageous. Just make sure your timeline is set to "Latest Tweets" and not "Home," and then you mostly just see in order Tweets from people you have chosen to follow. They do force various promoted Tweets into your feed, but in most cases they are just ads. As soon as someone I follow veers off into the crazy I unfollow them.
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