Was social media a terrible mistake?

All the furor over Elon Musk and Twitter has me considering the question: would it actually be terrible if he ran Twitter into the ground? Social media has done nothing worthwhile for society, on the contrary it has brought out the worst in people. Too many people fighting over politics, religion (or lack of), or stupid shit that has no impact or bearing on life. Its largely a waste of time.

What do you all think?

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ElwoodBlues · M

I agree with @bijouxbroussard that social media is a two edged sword, can be used for good or bad. There are many different groups of people with rare diseases connecting up and sharing notes and experience. There's also groups of asshats like 4chan.

Also, social media was inevitable; could not have been prevented in a free society. I think many sensible policies have evolved about social media. For example, the big cloud providers say you can't store threats of violence on their servers. It's part of the contract for use of convenient cloud hosting, and rules like that are very helpful in managing misueses of social media.