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When it comes to property crime, there is often a gap in perception between elected officials and the public. If you work to obtain and maintain a car, for example, you feel violated when a window is broken and stuff stolen regardless of who pays for the damage. You did not feel entitled to that car and may be motivated to do something. Our elected official sometimes have trouble understanding this because it is not their reality.

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Missing from this otherwise informative conversation is the negative economic incentive for platforms to limit any use of their product. Platforms are aware that zero limiting will ultimately the destroy the value of their product for a majority of their users and they will lose money. OK, what do they limit? The silent assumption in the middle to upper levels of management is to NOT to act very strongly in limiting "bad" communications so that the bottom line is not hurt. In the deep amygdala of these managers resides the instinct that every limit to access is taking money out of the pockets of the owners. It could be 1/10 of a cent, but that adds up to Billions. I see from Renee's Wikipedia page that she seems to have recognized this issue in an article she wrote (with others) in the Scientific American "It is Time to Open the Black Box of Social Media." (I have not read it, but one of the co-authors is Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth Professor I greatly respect.)

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"One of the more useful frameworks for what is happening today is rumors: people are spreading information that can maybe never be verified or falsified, within communities of people who really care about an issue."

This is a problem most perpetrated by females and their low-T CNN male counterparts.

"Boys’ antisocial behavior is overt; violence, theft, aggression, etc. For girls antisocial behavior takes the form of gossip, innuendo, reputation destruction, and back-biting. Social media facilitates this form of aggression. Indirect aggression scales online in a way that direct aggression does not. Penalties of overt aggression are clear; but you can more easily get away with covert aggression. Girls are now subject to bullying by their peers in a way they never have before. [You can’t punch a thousand people in the face at the same time, but you can get a thousand people to hate a single person overnight]."

Maybe we should just honor more "toxic masculinity" as a more productive way to settle differences?

Frankly I really don't think it is the general users of the social media platforms that are the worry... it is the institutions that exploit the divisive power of the platform for their own selfish ends, or that jettison real moral principles bending to a mob threat that might result in an immediate popularity hit.

And can we just admit that the algorithms are eating brains?

I love the dichotomy of left brained demand that we censor misinformation while also screaming opposition to banning TikTok... even though the left's Chinese communist comrades restrict the time and content of Chinese users to be limited and educational.

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