Comment by latexr

Bingo. And algorithmic social media feeds reward fringe opinions—the more hateful the better—because those drive “engagement” which translates to attention, fame, money. Which means people are incentivised to be as controversial as possible. They don’t even have to fully believe what they preach, they just have to ensure they can enrage a large enough number of people. Which in turn brings the people who really believe those things out of the woodwork and the slime ball of hate gets bigger and rolls faster.

Social media as a technology isn’t necessarily the root cause of all those problems. But it is the medium by which those were allowed and incentivised to proliferate at an ever increasing pace.