> People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant.
You'd think after 16 years I'd be used to it, but it still kinda blows my mind that the social network designed for context- and detail-free hot takes is the one people use for political discussion.
> Having to explain yourself long form leads to people attacking you and often being correct.
Typically, people just take a paragraph or so of a long form political argument out of context and use it to call the person making the argument evil. Which is basically the same principle as the typical political attack ad where you take a sentence your opponent said out of context to make your opponent look like a crazy extremist.
With a short form discussion platform, you can just go straight to the personal attacks, name-calling and out of context distortions of the other side's beliefs. Then we wonder why we suddenly live in a country where the 2 political parties can't compromise on anything and where one of the top political priorities for both parties is prosecuting and jailing their political opponents. I think its very dangerous to view most political discussion being short form context free hot takes as either inevitable or healthy for a government based on free and fair elections (such a norm, however, is probably beneficial to the long term stability and security of a dictatorship). In a society with a democratically elected government, you need free, civil and respectful discussion of issues and a basic level of respect for those who disagree with you. Remove those things and democracy dies just like a plant dies if you deprive it of water and dirt.
You’re missing the forest for the trees. What actually happened was social media allowed the weaponisation of microtargeted psychological warfare.
Read the books “mindfucked” and “targeted” for the detail on Cambridge Analytica (actually Strategic Communications Laboratory or SCL group) how it was a cognitive warfare firm developed for counter terrorism which was unleashed on the American, British (and now presumably Brazilian, Italian and French public).
People are not polarized just due to social media - social media is now a cognitive warfare battleground where cognitive heuristics are the trenches.
You'd think after 16 years I'd be used to it, but it still kinda blows my mind that the social network designed for context- and detail-free hot takes is the one people use for political discussion.