The State of Social Media Has Made Me Value Slow Friendships

With so many hearts heavy and brains overwhelmed, it’s a bad time to wade social media.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Last week on 60 Minutes, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen blew the whistle on the social media platform’s algorithms that amplify “angry content” and divisiveness. According to her depiction and internal research, political parties are aware that angry, polarizing, hateful content gets distributed more widely. Outrage earns traffic and engagement and incentivizes these messages. The alternative earns “crickets.”

Most of us have that nearly estranged uncle or former schoolteacher who we’ve had to block after watching their online identity spiral into extremism. A feedback loop of anger and negative attention turned people once loved distantly into a snarling digital sideshow. A person formerly esteemed becomes reduced in a scroll to hate speech and ugly memes.

Back when most of my own feed was photos of people’s dinner out or job change announcements or babies, occasional turbulence was tolerable. Life was normal; I could stomach when the online world got a little weird.

But then our political realities became more fractious, and the norm-shattering early days of the pandemic bled straight into our social media. That outlet functioned like a shared diary of our greatest…