The connection I see is something like "imaginary tribalism". The members of an audience form a one-sided sense of belonging that distorts their behaviors.
The mechanism seems to be the "media" part. All the promotional content is blasted out at scale in a way that triggers this false or amplified sense of social engagement. It's not the social part of social media that hurts, so much as the media platform part that enables so many promoters to thrive.
How much is an amplified sense of authority? It isn't just that there are promoters, but many of these promoters really dig into the ideas that they have the answers.
This leans into all media and aligns with how much credence is given to pundits. People with good ideas wind up digging in and pushing that they have the only reasonable idea.
The mechanism seems to be the "media" part. All the promotional content is blasted out at scale in a way that triggers this false or amplified sense of social engagement. It's not the social part of social media that hurts, so much as the media platform part that enables so many promoters to thrive.