That's not even remotely the same thing. When you post on an AOL message board, the only people that see it are people who are in AOL, use the Message Boards, and actively choose to read the thread and post with your message.

When I log in to Twitter right now I get a message that Ariana Grande has a new album. I don't follow her, I don't care about her, but Twitter decided I needed to see that.

I have notifications disabled but I can only imagine what it pushes out.

On top of that pushing of unsolicited information, the social networks purposely push controversial topics to gain your attention. After a while those controversial and outlandish posts are legitimized and normalized.

That's Twitter's choice to be user-hostile. There's no technical reason they can't show me all the posts from people I follow and nothing else.

Right, and that would be a lack of the amplification which is exactly what's being discussed.

The difference in scale is so astronomically large that using 'amplification' for both of these cases is misleading at best.

How many AOL users were there, total, in the 90s? Now, how many Twitter users are there, today? It's not even a fair fight.

That's only one metric, another would be trust, and clout, and others. The president tweeting is different from a random AOL user posting to a message board. Totally different beasts.

Huh? Assuming only talking about USA, AOL had more than 30 million subscribers. And that's not counting their family members/guests. Twitter claims to have 40 million active US members, a claim I doubt heavily. They aren't far off.

Not all AOL subscribers participated in these boards/posting though.

In addition, you have social media boosting other social medias, Facebook, Reddit, this place, each with their own individual brand of shenanigans. You didn't have that way back when (mostly because the alternatives were just as sparse)

30 million subscribers who read the message boards? And they all took each post as seriously as they do a tweet today? I doubt it. You're also cherry picking from my comment and ignoring the parts about how amplification is different today than then, outside of the numbers scale.

Also, I'm not comparing to just the USA twitter users either! It's a global platform. That matters. Retweets are not region-locked!

Not just message boards, live chat! Thousands and thousands of chat rooms, and everyone on IM, and everyone FWDing inappropriate emails around. I'm not sure how old you are or if you had AOL, but it was by far the most social internet experience I'd ever had!

Global users, of course, Twitter trumps it in count, no doubt. I only assumed US users because the post was about US politics.