It is interesting to know your view on this Tessa, and I respect it.
My thinking might be tainted by many years studying information and network theory, then practicing as a systems Engineer most of my professional life, designing communications systems for both military and commercial application, and lately studying machine intelligence systems, I see it as a fundamental systems architectural problem.
I see Social media platforms as accidentally designed for the wrong stakeholders.
Zuck, for example, freely admits he had no idea where facebook would go.
It was not designed, its architecture is accidental, and yet it has effectively become reference.
A lucky accident maybe for him, but not for everyone else.
Since then, pretty much every other social media network has had to follow pretty much the same flawed architecture, in order to have any chance of competing with the bigger players, practicing that unfair architecture, like facebook.
That flawed network architecture has been “validated” by the raging success of it to make profit, resulting in lots of consulting services specialising in its application.
Ad revenue, and attention revenue business models, like those of Google, complicate things even more, since those actually influence behaviour, and what people think.
It is an ever steepening uphill struggle to try to propagate analyses with these conclusions in profit driven networks, which in a weird way actually confirms the conclusion is true.
How can an analysis written by an expert in a forum of reasonably intelligent folk like Medium, claiming to reveal the real culprit of the Christchurch massacre, be read by only a handful of people, the day after the event, whether the conclusion is right or wrong, it is at least controversial to popular knowledge, and yet, generates zero controversy.
It got a handful of reads, and four claps, even now.
If you are interested, you can read it here:
