Social media just projects our toxic culture back at us. It a symptom not a cause. Until we address the reasons why our culture is toxic, mental health will continue to be a problem. Blaming social media, or any other easy target, just distracts from asking difficult questions and looking for real answers.
No. Social media algorithmically creates bubbles that isolate people into certain interests. It's a 'culture' manufactured by an algorithm to drive engagement i.e. ad buys. If anything it's a gross manipulation of culture.
This has little to do with "how toxic our culture is", but more "how social media is engineered to enable toxicity".
We see the problems with large scale social media in every culture, and the issues are the same everywhere.
The question should be raised if humans can actually deal with large scale social media. Perhaps, just like gambling, it should be outright banned or strictly enforced to comply with heavy restrictions
> Social media just projects our toxic culture back at us.
When I see Youtube trying to bait me into clicking on videos with disturbing, egregious, disgusting or sexualized thumbnails even though they have nothing to do with the keywords I entered in the search box, I fully disagree. There are also algorithms at play in order to maximise social media site bottom lines.
Some social media do promote and amplify some forms of content, in spite of the user, because it's lucrative to do so for them, otherwise they would not do it.
If you browse the internet without an ad blocker, you'll see these ads on mainstream websites that are optimized for clicks the exact same way.
