I left facebook a long time ago because it just felt like low value interaction. None of my friends on there were people I actually spent time with, and the whole thing seemed to just bring out the worst sides of people. I never specifically experienced the peer surveillance you describe, but I believe it's real or that social media has made people believe it's real (to a degree worthy of concern)
I think what I'm trying to say is that I don't relate to your perspective, but I don't doubt it, because to me social media is a cornucopia of ways to make yourself crazy and I believe that everyone that has a "why I think social media is making us worse people" rant is probably correct to some degree and highlighting a piece of a spectrum of horrible.
> the whole thing seemed to just bring out the worst sides of people
I wonder if it's still the case though. It's been years I haven't seen anyone arguing on my quiet feed. Maybe people have learned? or just deserted it?
Nowadays, the really toxic place is Twitter, orders of magnitude worse than FB has even been in my opinion.
Twitter is first with the news and political hot takes. Those and memes boil down to Facebook posts and reshares.
It’s pretty similar to what was the 4chan to Reddit to Facebook. But politics became more polarizing and every government official was giving their hot take. Instant short replies. I guess all those seconds of engagement add up.
Twitter is easy to sign up for, doesn't really require any sort of actual human details, and runs entirely on essentially short text blurbs that are easy to automate, scan, parse, and track.
Retweets, ratios, and bog-standard sentiment analysis also give immediate feedback as to success of a tweet. Real easy to tweak a bot to produce content, or to game the system -- and that's before GPT-4.
Facebook at least requires you to pretend you're a real person with a real face and real friends.
I think what I'm trying to say is that I don't relate to your perspective, but I don't doubt it, because to me social media is a cornucopia of ways to make yourself crazy and I believe that everyone that has a "why I think social media is making us worse people" rant is probably correct to some degree and highlighting a piece of a spectrum of horrible.