Tiktok, since it has made young people totally addicted to it. Most likely ruined many early brains so people cant live without constant dopamine hits. And probably ruined many school grades and future careers as well.

Its an escape from the world that is so shitty that people need mental relief from it.

Endgame capitalism.

YouTube for me. I just realized I’ve been experiencing brain-rot like symptoms (i.e. unable to concentrate, think deeply in realtime, continue conversations without much pre-thinking) for the past few years because I watch too much Lets Plays as a substitute for human interaction.

It’s not clear people are any dumber. People have always been dumb, and “everyone’s getting dumber” has always been a popular take - it used to be about too much TV; much earlier Plato blamed poetry.

I do see it wrecking people’s mental health and burning up their time and money. And that’s not even getting into how much power we’ve handed these companies over our devices and personal information in the process.

Facebook

Pretty sure facebook has been instrumental in at least one ethnic cleansing, so yeah that one

We say usually say Tiktok has ruined peoples mental health/politics, but I find facebook and twitter abhorent.

Stack overflow gave me an insult fetish :3

It’s hard to compare between platforms because of how they cater to different audiences, but if we’re going off sheer numerical scale towards social unrest, Facebook is the clear frontrunner.

The main reason is Facebook Zero, the program established to provide access to the platform in developing and under resourced nations at no costs to the users (with some exceptions), leading to billions of users around the world to view Facebook as “The internet” ™.

Wikipedia link to Facebook Zero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero

Criticism of Facebook Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook

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I would say they are all equally bad… But Facebook should take the crown: Cambridge Analytica

I think most of them have all done severe damage but in different flavors, perhaps with a little overlap between flavors. TikTok creates stupidity/zombiemind/brainwashed. Twitter creates fascists. Facebook creates idiots. Instagram creates egomaniacs and narcissists. Reddit is all over the place because it’s a collection of different sub-platforms.

Twitter/Bluesky/Threads/Mastodon

Twitter and it’s imitations have taught us quote-dunking, by extension the idea that online debates are productive, and the idea that nuance is a waste of words. Outside of that it’s just algorithmic curation in general that’s damaging so all the other sites are equal.

Anything that encourages the sharing of small snippets of information, elevates the prominence of misinformation thanks to engagement algorithms and reduces discourse to simple 3 word responses have caused the most damage.

So facebook/instagram/tiktok/twitter.

Reddit wouldn’t count in my view. It encourages lengthier, more critical responses. Yes its an echo chamber in places but its also pretty easy to avoid toxic content.

Twitter ruined people’s image of reality. The echo chamber, the content generated for follower counts, the view that the perspectives on Twitter somehow represented what the mainstream population was concerned with, the entitlement that stemmed from each individual thinking they had and deserved a megaphone, the dumbing down of thoughts to meet character limits; that platform was severely detrimental to American society. In my opinion, these issues are far worse than the brain rot, vapid influencer schtick, and right wing radicalization the others generated.

Either The Epstein list or Truth social