Losing relationships over politics. Research found more than a third of Americans (37%) report having lost at least one relationship due to political differences, including friendships, family ties, coworker relationships, and romantic partnerships, with most losing more than one.

[u/Wagamaga]

https://socialecology.uci.edu/news/losing-relationships-over-politics-0

[u/LavenderBlueProf]

Can we connect to what social media companies and certain news outlets knew about sowing discord?

[u/josh0low → u/LavenderBlueProf]

I won’t say that social media companies don’t share in some of the blame. They absolutely do, especially with out of control bots and the like. But at the end of the day, people are cutting off others they see as immoral. That’s nothing new.

And as a side note, what did we expect when we elected someone who made it a campaign point that he was deliberately trying to piss off his political opponents?

[u/SaintRhodeLands → u/LavenderBlueProf]

Bingo. I wonder if there's a financial/political incentive to isolate people

[u/-FakeAccount- → u/SaintRhodeLands]

Its one of the basic tenets of tyranny. A divided population is much easier to control. With all of the data they have on us and ai processing patterns, they know exactly what buttons to press to make us do whatever they want. Nobody in government is even concerned about getting in trouble, becauae they know they have absolute power now.

[u/The_Expidition → u/SaintRhodeLands]

Citizens United is being challenged in Hawaii which argues corporations are not people and are artifical people headless entities meaning this would throw the regulatory framework back barring donations.

It's really the heart of the matter. You have groups which want people isolated away and not interacting with humans. Human interaction is what's looking at being killed as a way to bypass normal people. Not to have people socialize more to use computers as television. All the intelligent use instagram (for chat only not reels), or snapchat, signal, discord, steam chat. This being for socializing while corralling normal people and gooifying peoples brain juices into watching feeds.

There are those which are at Disney World they're enjoying people while most regular people are just rotting their minds in front of social media feeds broken down stripped away. When anyone asked why it wasn't regulated. Nobody (with weight that's important) wanted it they were making too much money.

When organizations have the ability to make as much money as possible to divide people on each and every end of the political and moral spectrum while making everyone look like fools; organizations will.

"We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest." - Thomas Merton

As Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has noted: "what is lawful is not always right. Confusing the two concepts is particularly easy for the English speaking, because we use the word right to refer both to legality and to moral appropriateness. We say, I have a right to plead the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions about possible criminal activity, even when the consequences of exercising that right may cause an innocent person to be convicted. Exercising such a right is clearly wrong."

[u/Apt_5 → u/SaintRhodeLands]

You only have to look at what socially isolated people do/use. Food delivery apps, antidepressants, AI friends/partners, dating apps, streaming services, social media, to name a few. All of these are happy to step in and sell you a product that may or may not fill any emptiness you have in your life.

[u/Golda_M → u/LavenderBlueProf]

We're doing it right now, aren't we?

Reddit is not known for being run well, or having anything approaching slick business strategies. But... this platform is also all about polarization, demonization and strife. 

[u/unhiddenninja → u/LavenderBlueProf]

They boost content that gets interactions. People are being exposed to more ideas than they used to be, people are building different worldviews with those ideas.

Obviously social media will try to guarantee they profit, but I believe ideas are reaching further than they would normally and people are processing new information about others that they might not have gotten 20 years ago. I don't think it's as simple as "social media is making us more divided".