We're getting the social media crisis wrong

“My explanation of what is happening is this. We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation - that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one.”

I found this piece super duper interesting and it is long, but the conclusions about how so much of our public discourse is being controlled by really rich dudes with clear agendas is awful for our public life. We're seeing that in a lot of ways and I fear it's going to get worse before it gets better.