https://responsiblestatecraft.org/china-cold-war-2669160202/
Nice to see your hard earned tax dollars are going towards such a fabulous cause. Meanwhile I've heard it said that Chinese and Russian bots exploit divisions in the Western world by talking about things like poverty, homelessness, gun violence, racism and sexism. Well maybe you should start doing something about those issues to stop them being used as fuel for alleged foreign propaganda efforts hmmm?
yeah but you said "propaganda" not "societal cohesion". I'm sure the Red Scare is pretty much entirely due to propaganda.
societal cohesion is unraveling, i think, because the internet has expanded the influence of manipulators over vulnerable individuals. As more people fall for these manipulative tactics, it boosts the credibility of absurd claims simply because they gain popularity.
Lack of social cohesion is what makes people open to all sorts of ideas outside the mainstream, including propaganda. Social cohesion isn't unravelling because of the internet, it's unravelling because people's standard of living is collapsing and they don't believe that the government is working in their interest. Internet has been around for a long time now, but the political polarization is a very recent phenomenon that perfectly coincides with the ongoing financial crisis that started in 2008.
Your points definitely have merit but I still think that a large portion of it is due to every single thing we see on the internet is divisive and a call to arms.
Reminder that the little island weve inhabited here avoids so much of the mainstream bullshit and ragebaiting algos. Mainstream non-cuated feeds are so bad.
Either way our points go hand-in-hand.
Thing is that the internet is a global phenomenon, and we don't see the same thing happening in all the countries. So, the internet itself clearly cannot be the explanation here. There are specific issues present in the US society that we see manifesting as political polarization. I do agree with you that the internet makes it easier for ideas to spread, and thus it acts as an accelerant. However, there need to be underlying divisions to accelerate in the first place.