Comment by hodgesrm
> It's way worse in post-social algos than anything that's come before
By what standard? Judged by outcomes it's hard for me to see that the effects will be worse than historical events like the French Revolution or the Killing Fields of Cambodia. [0,1] They and many others included periods of indiscriminate slaughter that tore apart societies.
I don't mean to undersell the effect of the Internet. Technologies do come along that make things fundamentally different. Social media amplifies fringe views and makes it possible for people holding those views to find each other more easily. The guardrails for bad behavior are also much weaker online. At the same time many IRL institutions that held US society together have become far weaker. [2] It's hard to untangle these effects in the moment, but some of the forces pulling US society apart date back to the 1960s or earlier.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror