Controlling the agora …

… Social Media and Other Diseases. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Social media encourages reactions to content far more than it encourages actual content, and the companies' algorithms promote posts that cause the audience reaction of "likes" and "shares." As the algorithms for deciding which to promote grow more sophisticated and more hidden from users, the super-virus grows stronger. "Social media not only makes informed debate more difficult on their platforms," Reynolds argues, but also "rewires people's brains in such a fashion as to make such debate more difficult everywhere else."