Facebook is pretty bad for society, but Twitter has also been quite bad. IMO Twitter has always been the real problem. Facebook replaced Email as the channel of choice for your weird relatives to spread conspiracy theories. And that is bad, but it is just an enhancement of a constant thing.

Twitter: all the journalists and elected officials signed up and decided the stuff that went on there Mattered and was News. The shitposts that showed up in their feed became social trends.

It is a widespread failure, but if we had to pick a thread that we should call the start of that part of the unraveling, I’d point at Twitter. I mean, that’s just the social media bit. Social media didn’t cause, like, Afghanistan or whatever.

Yeah, all social media has been pretty toxic for society. But Twitter has been especially bad. Turns out that requiring everyone to use very short messages means that interactions devolve into short, hot takes almost immediately. And then people just get angrier and angrier at each other as they fight back and forth via those barbs. Twitter couldn't have done more to unravel the social fabric if they actively tried to.