How Facebook Warps Our Worlds
THOSE who’ve been raising alarms about Facebook are right: Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we’re pointed toward foregone conclusions. We’re pressured to conform.
.. “And one of the things we want is to spend more time with people who think like us and less with people who are different,” Haidt added
.. this information is utterly contingent on choices we ourselves make. If we seek out, “like” and comment on angry missives from Bernie Sanders supporters, we’ll be confronted with more angry missives from more Sanders supporters. If we banish such outbursts, those dispatches disappear.
.. The Internet isn’t rigged to give us right or left, conservative or liberal — at least not until we rig it that way. It’s designed to give us more of the same
.. We construct precisely contoured echo chambers of affirmation that turn conviction into zeal, passion into fury, disagreements with the other side into the demonization of it.
.. We question their wisdom and substitute it with the groupthink of micro-communities
.. Haidt noted that it often discourages dissent within a cluster of friends by accelerating shaming. He pointed to the enforced political correctness among students at many colleges
.. “Facebook allows people to react to each other so quickly that they are really afraid to step out of line,” he said.