It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs — interspersed with photos of a family picnic — with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip.
Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior.
It’s not just democracy, but information quality in general.
This is what we get for seeking profits more than truth.
The same problems exist in the fedivwrse, so it’s not because of profit.
Profit makes it worse, but the real problem is humans can be shitty - all of us - at one time or another.
It is soooo very hard to overcome our natural biases. An interesting video on the subject: https://youtu.be/5Peima-Uw7w .
