That's the title of a book by Max Fisher. I'm only halfway through it but I've already seen plenty. Fisher documents with excruciating detail how so-called social media -- most notably Facebook, YouTube, the application formerly known as Twitter, and TikTok -- use mindless machine learning to hijack some of people's natural tendencies and drive them into cesspools of disinformation, extremism, and hatred.
The companies that own that own these platforms know full well what is happening but they only care about money and they adamantly refuse to do anything about it. Facebook has literally caused mob violence, mass murder and in Myanmar, actual genocide. This happens because the platforms exploit human tendencies to seek out social connection and support, while at the same time identifying "others" who are outside of the group, responding to perceived threats, and punishing moral transgressors. The algorithms that suggest posts to users take advantage of these tendencies in order to keep people transfixed, clicking, posting, and most important, looking at advertisements. Quoting from the Amazon review:
Traversing the planet, Fisher tracks the ubiquity of hate speech and its spillover into violence, ills that first festered in far-off locales, to their dark culmination in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection. Through it all, the social-media giants refused to intervene in any meaningful way, claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear.
And in case you have been as baffled by the DJ Trump cult as I have been, now you have your explanation.
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