I wonder if it's still the case though. It's been years I haven't seen anyone arguing on my quiet feed. Maybe people have learned? or just deserted it?
Nowadays, the really toxic place is Twitter, orders of magnitude worse than FB has even been in my opinion.
It’s pretty similar to what was the 4chan to Reddit to Facebook. But politics became more polarizing and every government official was giving their hot take. Instant short replies. I guess all those seconds of engagement add up.
Retweets, ratios, and bog-standard sentiment analysis also give immediate feedback as to success of a tweet. Real easy to tweak a bot to produce content, or to game the system -- and that's before GPT-4.
Facebook at least requires you to pretend you're a real person with a real face and real friends.
I think what I'm trying to say is that I don't relate to your perspective, but I don't doubt it, because to me social media is a cornucopia of ways to make yourself crazy and I believe that everyone that has a "why I think social media is making us worse people" rant is probably correct to some degree and highlighting a piece of a spectrum of horrible.