Journalists love to talk about the danish study that paid people to quit Facebook and found that they were measurably happier. They conveniently ignore that the other measurable change was that people were less informed about current events/consumed less news. Which is a pretty unsurprising finding - the thing that people argue most about on social media is the very news/opinion clickbait that journalists produce.

Put it another way, if peopled replaced time spent on social media with time spent reading NYT/FOX/CNBC/CNN, would they become more or less upset and polarized? My money would be on more...

I wager less upset but more polarized. While filter bubble is a term coined in the social media age, these news stations make for some of the easiest ways to create them IRL. one person of "authority", with complete, uncontested control on how to frame the news, typically gathering like minds who want to listen to it.

At least comment sections challenging a news piece gives some avenue for the audience to consider other angles to the story. I may not agree with every comment here on how they interpret this bill, but it gives me a wider look on the issue than if I listened only to LATime's take on it.

Traditional media didn't take over human socialization. You could socialize without having "traditional media" watch over and control who you talk to and what you talk about.

TV can absolutely be evil, but you can choose to not watch TV and still be able to socialize with peers using the telephone or paper mail back in the day.

Nowadays, the "TV" (which now fits in your pocket) is also the primary way humans communicate, so you can't switch off the "TV" without also severely hampering your ability to communicate with other people.

Hell, a lot of small businesses don't even have websites anymore, it's all in some bullshit social-media platform.

> Facebook et al are not doing anything traditional media hasn’t been doing since its inception.

"Quantity has a quality all its own" (presumably by Stalin)

Traditional media was time and place bound. Its reach was maybe 10% (at most!) of that of social media. Social media is always on, always available.

That changes a lot of things.

Traditional media was constrained to the TV, radio and newspapers. It didn't try to take over human communication. You could opt out entirely and still be able to participate in society just fine.

Social media is a cancer that spread to a lot of day-to-day necessities and keeps spreading - some businesses don't even have websites anymore.

>some businesses don't even have websites anymore.

I think that opens a differnet discussion altogether. Yelp can be considered a "social media". It's a website where users provide content (in this case, reviews) with some various algorithms made to encourage businesses to play ball to get high visibility. but I doubt any of the proposals discussed here would affect Yelp. Kids sure as heck aren't concerned with ratings over businesses they often can't pay for.

So would it be bad if a company lacked a website and relied on Yelp, whose goal isn't the same as Instagram's?

This is directly true. Facebook courted media corps in Davos, but wouldn’t agree to their demands, and so the media corps waged all out war.

So disingenuous.