>There a lot of money in social media, literally hundreds of billions of dollars. I expect the case against it will continue to grow, like the case against cigarettes did.

I don't think it follows that something making money must do so by being harmful. I do think strong regulation should exist to prevent businesses from introducing harmful behaviours to maximise profits, but to justify that opinion I have to believe that there is an ability to be profitable and ethical simultaneously.

>events this week have been an excellent case study in how fast misinformation (charitably) and lies (uncharitably) spread across social media

On the other hand The WSJ, Guardian, and other media outlets have published incorrect information on the same events. The primary method that people had to discover that this information was incorrect was social media. It's true that there was incorrect information and misinformation on social media, but it was also immediately challenged. That does create a source of conflict, but I don't think the solution is to accept falsehoods unchallenged.

If anything education is required to teach people to discuss opposing views without rising to anger or personal attacks.

> I don't think it follows that something making money must do so by being harmful.

My point isn't that it's automatically harmful, simply that there is a very strong incentive to protect the revenue. That makes it daunting to study these harms.

> On the other hand The WSJ, Guardian, and other media outlets have published incorrect information on the same events. The primary method that people had to discover that this information was incorrect was social media.

I agree with your point here too, and I don't think the solution is to completely stop or get rid of social media. But, the problem I see is there are tons of corners of social media where you can still see the original lies being repeated as if they are fact. In some spaces they get challenged, but in others they are echoed and repeated uncritically. That is what concerns me - long debunked rumors and lies that get repeated because they feel good.

> If anything education is required to teach people to discuss opposing views without rising to anger or personal attacks.

I think many people are actually capable of discussing opposing views without it becoming so inflammatory... in person. But algorithmic amplification online works against that and the strongest, loudest, quickest view tends to win in the attention landscape.

My concern is that social media is lowering people's ability to discuss things calmly, because instead of a discussion amongst acquaintances everything is an argument is against strangers. And that creates a dynamic where people who come to argue are not arguing against just you, but against every position they think you hold. We presort our opponents into categories based on perceived allegiance and then attack the entire image, instead of debating the actual person.

But I don't know if that can fixed behaviorally, because the challenge of social media is that the crowd is effectively infinite. The same arguments get repeated thousands of times, and there's not even a guarantee that the person you are arguing against is a real person and not just a paid employee, or a bot. That frustration builds into a froth because the debate never moves, it just repeats.