A lot of known cognitive distortions can converge. It's well known that for most people what they think of as truth comes essentially from who they trust. When a sufficient number of friends firmly believe something, it's fairly automatic to think it must be true. We evolved in a village and that's still how our minds work.

I think social media is essentially a vast psychological experiment. I wish there was more oversight and transparency there. I have some knowledge in both computer science and psychology and the power to influence in computer algorithms is quite frankly scary. One experiment showed a huge change in opinion created by just slightly lowering rankings of search results. It's only relatively few people that understand that their search results are tailored for them and other people may get completely different results - including in youtube.

I think it was close to criminal that the Great Barrington Declaration was shadow banned (removed from search results), and so not many people know that 60,000 scientists and health care professionals signed it. They thought there was scientific consensus based on their media feeds. On the other side, it was also easy for those disagreeing with general policies to find imbalanced "conspiracy" ideas like 5g harms or that Covid doesn't exist according to their own search results. We completely lacked good faith public discussion by disagreeing experts - most people had their information silos and so "othered" disagreeing views.

It's made me more cynical about the future and that good faith dialogue is possible. I hope I'm wrong.