No the 2016 election was the god send, news and social media companies absolutely love Trump for the 24/7 insane news and discussion that comes from every time the guy opens his bitch mouth. And people really think the media has a bias against him. You wish. If they were against him you wouldn't hear about him. Look at the coverage Bernie Sanders got in both 2016 and 2020. Very comparable to that of Ron Paul. When the media really doesn't want a candidate (or even movement) they will straight up black list them. At best there's the occasional pity article that goes like "he's got a movement with some support from (insert most unrelatable people to blue collar Americans) and his policies are nice but here's why it won't work etc".

You have things slightly backward. Whenever people say that they get money from hate speech and disinformation I always think of the underpants gnomes in South Park.

Step 1: Destry civilization. Step 2: ?? Step 3: Profit

It lacks logic, and becomes flat out wrong when you consider that advertisers don’t want their ads beside negative sentiment. All things being equal, if you had two social media networks with similar demographics, they will prefer their ads to be on the one that makes people happier and feel better. This has nothing to do with morals and everything to do with profit and sentiment analysis in marketing

The issue is that people are inherently incapable of freely sharing and consuming information responsibly. They do not check against information that confirms their biases. Echo chambers form on a scale that is not possible to police without a state-sized apparatus. They are betting that ML models will solve this, but I don’t think that will be possible in the foreseeable future. I’m not worried that social media giants are evil and want to destroy the world. What worries me is that they don’t want this, are actually spending colossal sums of money on it, and are failing.

When Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were young they were actually credited with aiding occupy movements and the Arab Spring. One Egyptian activist talked about Facebook specifically as a media where they could spread hope, and that the generations they were fighting against didn’t have the understanding to fight back. Well they developed that understanding somewhere along the way. That is how these platforms are built. That is the inevitable function of their form unless the state claims control and places it under their own moderating apparatus. Whether Zuckerberg is a saint or a lizard has 0 to do with the outcome of this type of technology.

True. Check out the NewsBreak app one day if you have the time. Chock full of all kinds of hate imaginable. They never take anything down.

The governments could use block chain technology for elections. Then within seconds any claim of rigged elections would be defeated.