If you’re citing Matt Taibbi as a trustworthy source, man, I don’t know. He’s up there with Bari Weiss for “they’re either intentionally bad faith, stupid, or both” levels of nuance.
I not only read what he wrote, I read the screenshots of OG twitter. And what he said mirrored what they said. They were incredibly one sided an censorious as hell. Your post is basically just an ad hominem. A fallacy.
For something to be an ad hominem, one needs to be 1) addressing or responding to an argument 2) by attacking the character of the person making the argument rather than the substance of the argument.
Even though OP didn’t provide them, I can think of many supporting examples for their assertion that Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are either intentionally operating in bad faith, or stupid, or both. So this does not at all meet the definition of ad hominem.
Put another way: “you’re wrong because you’re stupid” is an ad hominem. “You’re wrong, and I think you’re stupid because [reason]” is not. This holds even if the person making the argument does not explicitly give the reason.
It was very interesting because it came to light the administration in power at the time, trump, leaned heavily on Twitter to promote what they wanted and hide they wanted hid. Meanwhile Biden's campaign requested revenge porn be removed and Matt and friends got extremely upset about that and called it government overreach (Biden wasn't in office at the time, of course).
I doubt that Zuckerberg really uses either Facebook or Instagram all that much. Maybe as a curated PR channel sure, but he's not doom scrolling Instagram at bedtime.
If you know what the platform is capable of, if you seen how the sausage is made, you're probably not using it.
People are also a little naive in not seeing that these platforms aren't just bad for children, they are bad for adults as well. I'm not oppose to not "selling" them to children, but we also need to label correctly for adults and have rules like those for alcohol, tobakko and gambling, so no or limited advertising. Scrub the public spaces of Facebook logos.
I'm not sure if it's naiveté, it's probably more that we are all complacent. If all Facebook/Instagram users (and perhaps, even if only those with children), stopped using, that would be an actual stick, wouldn't it.. But we don't (I'm not excluding myself).
Deeper than that, it might be food for thought if someone can't stop doom scrolling. It does not matter the platform, if people are "addicted" to "bad news" it might be the person at the corner of the street ("the end is nigh! repent!"), the pharmacy next block or something else.
I personally stopped using Facebook because it was annoying me with useless doom and aggressive comments of people on stupid topics. If it would have showed me only cat pictures (like Instagrams does) or reasonable stuff (news, etc.) I would have continued using it.
Discussions from proper experts about absolute toxicity of social networks in their implementation are at least... 15 years old at this point? At least that, and I am not talking about rare article here and there but onslaught of articles in popular media from all sides. But parents... mostly didn't give a fuck.
Lets admit it, in same vein trump is a symptom of current US society, the approach and effects of social networks we allow them to be is a result of how lazy and thus addicted people got. On top of many of the parents doing exactly the same, then don't expect miracles.
One thing that I don't understand - even here, some folks call that sociopathic amoral piece of shit 'zuck' and treat his empire like some sort of semi-charity. When I attacked facebook company in the past, there was always a lot of defense (look at this open sourced stuff, look at that... which I presume came from either direct employees or clueless stock holders). People are people, deeply flawed and often weak without willingness to admit it to themselves.
AI? I just read it and remembered how I got busted for writing papers for friends. Style and voice are tangible and I'm getting an uncanny valley creepy crawlies from the opening of this article. edit, maybe some AI segments, I would guess the author is young and will write differently in a few years.
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