“[Social media] is like a game where you get 1 point for being fair and thoughtful and 1000 points for character assassination”
https://twitter.com/paultoo/status/1100144882872532992
This is partly why I spent so much time writing a media literacy guide to explain the incentives behind what we see in our feeds and our newspapers:
https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....
If you regularly treat people you are friends with badly it is generally on you and people will choose to disengage from a relationship with you.
If you regularly behave in a destructive manner towards members of a real life group then you at some point run out of individuals in that group that will invite you to real life group gatherings.
This is exactly why sociopaths and psychopaths quickly run out of connections and have to move around a lot.
Counterpoint: the Republican Party in the US still has strong support amongst many people its policies end up hurting.
We have created conditions of perverse incentives in our media. We reward extremists. We reward unfounded accusations. We reward people saying wacko things. "If it bleeds, it leads."
We need to stop allowing the extremes to "wag the dog."
EDIT: This doesn't mean we should censor people. Rather, it means we need to become a little cynical and self aware of the mechanism of outrage virality itself.
Specifically, we need to stop mindlessly rewarding mass murderers with attention. We need to stop mindlessly rewarding people who act extreme for attention, period.