Yes. "You are what you eat" also applies to information diets. Consume simplistic, small-minded information, produce simplistic, small-minded thoughts. One of the key takeaways from Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" is how political and economic forces on 20th century mass media shape and constrain its contents; you will rarely come across content that runs antithetical to the interests and ethos of advertisers or providers of capital, which all provide funding to mass media outlets and thus enable their existence. Further, the government, with a monopoly on access to privileged or authoritative knowledge, is able to supply the mass media with information germane to its own agendas.

Messages will evolve according to the conditions of the medium that carries them; similarly to how biological organisms either adapt and thrive or fail according to the constraints of their environment, there exist selective pressures that determine, ultimately, what content is promoted and thrives according to the whims of the social media algorithm. "The medium is the message," and the predominant message of social media is short-form brainrot. The need to publish "content" on a regular, daily, or even live-streamed 24/7 basis incentivizes the production of quick takes, short videos, and soundbytes instead of slow, deliberative, measured thoughts that may take months, years, or longer to assemble into a literate medium. The latter form of content is actively selected against in a social media environment; thus, the proliferation of groupthink and stupidity.

> Does anyone else feel like Instagram "moderation" is, well, basically a lost cause?

I am low-key thinking about that problem all the time. The more I think the less I believe that it is even surmountable.

From that vantage point it sure looks like Meta does an incredible, excellent top-notch job on that. That's the failed 0.001% that are notoriously and hilariously wrong. While it sucks and hits the pain points, we can all agree it's more or less inevitable. No system can be 100% perfect. And yes, I have been on the receiving end of that lance multiple times and yes it sucks.

That's pretty much all media including the 24 hour daily news.

Yeah, I'm not sure what people are really expecting from these "platforms".

At the scale of Instagram you're basically expecting them to act as a censor for billions of people. It's like imagining an agent on every street corner preventing people from discussing what they like in the pub. You might be able to influence the direction, and you might be able to use models to blanket ban certain things, but real moderation? You'd need to employ hundreds of millions.

My experience on Tiktok: I press "not interested" on some post, then again two three times on similar posts — it stops showing such posts.

My experience on Instagram: I press not interested. It keeps showing exact same thing over and over.

They're not erring on the side of anything. They removed a post containing two "Grinning Squinting Face" emojis but left one up telling all gay people to "get in the ground".

The state-sponsored actors (with the US being one of those states) are censoring people and also using LLM bots as well to gaslight them.

Democracy cannot work without freedom of speech, and I would argue anonymous freedom of speech. Block bots, not people.

I just wanted to throw out there that having an informed electorate was one of the reasons there is the Electoral College. We can blame LLMs, etc. now but low-information, easily-swayed voters has always been an issue.