Social media divides us, makes us more extreme and less empathetic, it riles us up or sucks us into doom scrolling, making us stressed and depressed. It feels like we need to touch grass and escape to the real world.

New research shows that we might have largely misinterpreted why this is the case. It turns out that the social media internet may uniquely undermine the way our brains work but not in the way you think.

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  • meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
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    10 months ago

    Why are people weaving social media and the internet into a single thread? The internet is so vast, social media makes up a tiny sliver of it.

    The real problem with the internet isn’t Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, it’s the fact the entire experience is pretty much controlled by Microsoft and Google. As they shape your content, lock you out of areas and generally dictate what’s “legal” or even what gets found during your searches.

    It’s no longer an information superhighway but rather turning into a giant storefront. And that’s the problem. I search for anything and the first 3 pages are Amazon link backs. Or fake websites with AI generated content used only for ad impressions.

    Facebook and the like definitely erode some parts, but as a whole, there is way more fuckery going on by big tech.

    And this isn’t even mentioning the tracking and fingerprinting and violations to privacy and security we are all promised.

    • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
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      10 months ago

      The real problem with the internet isn’t Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, it’s the fact the entire experience is pretty much controlled by Microsoft and Google. As they shape your content, lock you out of areas and generally dictate what’s “legal” or even what gets found during your searches.

      I agree the Google and MS are a problem, but Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are also a problem, albeit a different one.

      • meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        Yeah not saying they aren’t shit. Just that the internet isn’t just social media. I surf with mullvad blocking all nuisances (social media included) and I don’t even really feel its effects unless I actually try to visit facebook.com or equivalent.

        • Move@feddit.it
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          10 months ago

          I think this is where you’re wrong. Facebook, together with google, ms, apple and amazon, are building all the tech nowadays and thus shaping the internet according to their priorities, and this is the biggest problem.

          • meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
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            10 months ago

            Apple is a hardware company. Over 90% of their cash comes from hardware. Latest figures show that about 6-8% are from services. Aside from making a browser that’s quite popular on mobile, they really have little to no control on the net.

            Their partners certainly do, but they are not a software company. They have nowhere near the impact Google or Microsoft do because those two are both service companies and both actually control and own giant slices of the net. Google has shaping the net’s infrastructure for decades now.

            Not saying Apple doesn’t influence in other ways, but is just a spec compared to the companies that actually own parts of the nets backbone.

            It’s going to be like old telecom soon, where the companies that own the physical lines have all the control. And that’s scary. I don’t want kids growing up using Google Internet or Microsoft AllNet to access the web.

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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      10 months ago

      Why are people weaving social media and the internet into a single thread?

      Because when people say the internet sucks, they’re not talking about TCP/IP or HTTPS or SSH or FTP. They’re talking about their experience interacting with websites and other people online, i.e. the social aspects, essentially the World Wide Web portion (but also hardware as a service). Everything you mentioned is in that tiny sliver, and is what people take issue with.

      • mog77a@beehaw.org
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        10 months ago

        Doesn’t seem to matter where you go these days, you still run into cloudflare, somewhere along the chain. They’re omnipresent in a way other companies aren’t.

        Pain in the ass sometimes, but god damn do they make great services.

      • meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        I worry about that shit more than I do what social is doing. The fact Meta, Google, MS, etc can control actual parts of the internet is just beyond wild to me.

        Go capitalism 🙃

    • 0xtero@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      The real problem with the internet isn’t Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, it’s the fact the entire experience is pretty much controlled by Microsoft and Google

      I think the real problem is that the entire Internet is basically just a dozen multi-billion Big Tech companies and the entire “Internet economy” is so tightly weaved into advertising money.

      • meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        Yeah what a future! Literally everywhere you look or turn, there’s someone yelling in your ear for cash. Can’t wait 🙃

        It’s honestly wild that our species has gotten here. When are we setting up on Mars again??

        • 0xtero@kbin.social
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          10 months ago

          What’s really wild is that you don’t have to go that far into the past (just ca. 20 years) when the Internet was all about Information wanting to be Free. It was hopeful time of people coming together around new technology. There were a lot new businesses with wild innovations.

          And then, just in a decade it was all gone. Replaced by unregulated behemoths that merged until there’s a dirty dozen left, controlling most of global money and information.

          Enshittification of the Internet.