Social medias harm to democracy

Trust thought for today - about engaging or not on social media. 

This is a brilliant article in the Atlantic from Jonathan Haidt analysing the evidence of social media harms to democracy.  

But among the many quotes I copied is below.  It chimes with my current view. Quite a few times, even just this morning on LinkedIn, I have written a post in response to some rather extreme, or in my view deeply misguided content and decided after 30 mins work to delete it. Is it right that misinformation spreads, should alternative views be aired? Is it important to democracy that all voices are part of the debate and bad that misleading content goes unchallenged? Also, I might be wrong and they right, should I make an effort to seek out and get to know other perspectives. Is this in itself undemocratic. Probably.

But then again it's my life and my time and I don't want to spend the next few hours or days involved in tit for tat discussions with people who are not really interested in my point of view either way. And err, I'm not much interested in theirs. A bubble? So be it. But also if we don't give bad ideas the oxygen of attention they may die. This might be a good thing.

"Social media has put us all in the middle of a Roman coliseum, and many in the audience want to see conflict and blood. But once we realize that we are the gladiators—tricked into combat so that we might generate “content,” “engagement,” and revenue—we can refuse to fight."

I have loads of wonderful and thoughtful constructive people on my feed, my time will be spent engaging with them, even when we challenge each other and disagree. I am refusing to fight. For now!