>It's frustrating that the discussion around technology's effects on society is still stuck between the extremes of:

It is not just tech. It is pretty much everything else on the internet and media. No one is telling me the pros and cons anymore. After I read the pros I have to go and dig up my own list of cons or vice versa. No one is finishing the sentence with "having said that" and round off with some counter argument. Most are so consumed by their own ideology they fail to see anything else.

>It's worth considering if exposure to FB is what is causing the userbase increasingly "low rent". Yeah, FB didn't invent partisanship, misinformation, nor authoritarianism, but I think likely it is worsening it.

I would argue had any other Social Network raised instead of Facebook during the Web 2.0 era the effect would had been the same. I once try to make a smaller social network to force an opposite view on their feeds to try and balance things. Holly mother of god the backlash were insane. My conclusion was that this sort of extremism is a function of human nature. Before social media people would buy news paper they prefer or fit their own ideology.

"The only way to understand the Press is to remember that they pander to their readers' prejudices."

- Sir Humphrey Appleby

Internet "press" is no different to press in the 80s. Only at a much greater scale and fully automatic.