Honestly, it’s kind of a wild claim to be seen in 2026, when, nearly over a decade ago, Facebook was abusing this exact thing and optimizing their social media algorithms specifically to manipulate and divide people because it increased engagement.

And here we are, seemingly having forgotten the past, which is barely even history at this point, and are finding ourselves surprised that the exact thing that was being built has the exact effect that it was being built to create.

Even more astonishing is the number of people in this comment section either arguing against that or refuting it.

Don’t worry, I’m sure AI is going to make that all better, right? Right?

It’s literally one of the things that gives lobbies and billionaires the level of control that they have.

Why do you think they managed to keep growing and maintaining control? It’s because everyone else is going at each other’s throats over artificially created cultural issues in an ever-ongoing culture war, largely fueled by these people and spread and scaled over social media.

Social media is literally the weapon they use, and almost no one has any idea of the level of manipulation they are subject to through their feeds.

It’s not just the speed of communication, it’s the scale of communication. Someone can light up thousands of bot accounts to push a particular message in minutes and reach millions of people in the next hour, subtly manipulating them based on mass amounts of data available to individually target people vulnerable to your specific campaign

Whereas in the days of newspapers, you had to get it in the newspaper. You had to get it printed, and that newspaper would only reach so many people in so much time due to the literal physical limitations of time and distance. Many of the people that would be reached may not be interested in or vulnerable to what you are trying to state.

The newspaper equivalent of today is a newspaper that is made as a special case for each person it’s being delivered to, specifically tailored to take advantage of their political leanings, their fears, their ignorance, and so on and so forth.

Rumors have been spreading for a millennium, and democracy has been okay in the sense that democracy has only been a thing relatively recently. Social media didn’t exist 1,000 years ago as a means to spread rumors at scale to hundreds of millions of people.

Something that was said decades ago is that every village used to have an idiot. Now every idiot has a village.

And even more so now, the efforts of one person to sway public opinion can push lies to hundreds of millions of people, which is something that has been impossible up till now.

That’s the point. Rumors are, in many ways, more dangerous than lies, since they mix in with the truth in ways that make them more believable.

What about anything you said refutes the point?

If it’s adding that many lines, it’s not refactoring. It’s just adding slop.