That's not the point. Social media algorithms amplify every form of madness and toxicity, because it draws people in and gets their attention. Crazy sorts of conspiracy theories, radical ideologies, cults, memetic mental illness, you name it... the more toxic it is the more it drives engagement.
This phenomenon isn't fundamentally new. Media has understood "if it bleeds it leads" for hundreds of years. What I think is new is how tight the optimization loop is, how personalized it is, and the way crowdsourcing the inputs leads to a firehose of content that isn't even attempting to be accurate or sane. It's a machine that automatically curates randomly sourced content for maximum inflammatory response and maximum addictiveness.
Here's another pile of examples unrelated to conspiracy theories:
This phenomenon isn't fundamentally new. Media has understood "if it bleeds it leads" for hundreds of years. What I think is new is how tight the optimization loop is, how personalized it is, and the way crowdsourcing the inputs leads to a firehose of content that isn't even attempting to be accurate or sane. It's a machine that automatically curates randomly sourced content for maximum inflammatory response and maximum addictiveness.
Here's another pile of examples unrelated to conspiracy theories:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/
This is what you get when you run the recommendation algorithm on random crowdsourced kids' content.