Social media is an environment for spreading brain viruses. Here is how it works (with Twitter as an example, even without an algorithmic timeline):
A person tweets something. They have N followers
A subset of those followers may see the tweet (the equivalent to getting close to an infected person), and a further subset of those will click retweet (the equivalent to getting infected)
The proces then repeats with their follower's followers and so on (exponentially)
As such, Twitter is an environment where various ideas and their mutations are generated in a similar manner to viral organisms, and the "fittest" ones survive and spread exponentially. You could probably even calculate the R0 of a tweet (i.e. average number of retweets, quote tweets etc caused by a previous tweet)
All of this in turn means that the fitness function of the environment is incredibly important. Now, would you say Twitter as an environment encourages carefully checking information with other sources or for contradictions before clicking retweet? Or does it favor tweets that provoke a quick emotional reaction and a retweet within a couple of seconds of reading them?
Note: for specific harm, I posted an example of what social media can do to people (link is on threadreader https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1458881015917678594.html). I realize its long, but its really hard to explain the problem without seeing the effect in its entirety, especially given how we all (me included) hold free speech in high regard. (Yes I still do, but I now also understand how easily it can be abused to cause immeasurable harm in our new social media environments, and I think we must be at least aware of this)
Nah, you're just making things up and haven't provided any valid evidence to justify restrictions on free speech. Stupid people have always believed stupid things since long before social media. Remember the days of forwarded hoax email chains?
Words are not harmful, unless they're a specific and credible threat or incitement to violence. People claiming otherwise are defining down "harm" to such an extent as to make the term meaningless.
Once people start saying speech is violence I exit the conversation. Generally said by the most white bread privileged people because they've never experienced actual, real violence.
The ironic thing here is that the main reason you've seen that kind of claim is because social media tends to spread the most outrageous / novel / radical kinds of speech (in turn further causing radicalization among the recipients of it)
More discussion about vulnerability to cognitive biases, speech that abuses and exploits them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzzjbSkrLCQ and how social media design supports and reinforces this kind of speech over others.
To see what I mean by harm, read the threadreader link.
My best idea so far is similar to the solution we had for yellow press and tabloids. We learned to recognize and be aware of manipulative kinds of journalism. If we are all careful, more aware and more skeptical - especially on social media - there will be less opportunity to be duped.
But this is a very old game of indirectly signaling one's pretensions of superior human quality by implying that things others consider harmful are do not qualify as harms to themselves, and thus less important than the freedoms that they desire to have, some of which may inflict those harms on others.
Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1986 Amjads (pvt) Ltd VIRUS_SHOE RECORD V9.0 Dedicated to the dynamic memories of millions of viruses who are no longer with us today - Thanks GOODNESS!!! BEWARE OF THE er..VIRUS : this program is catching program follows after these messages....$#@%$@!!
Speech isn't more powerful today than before. Speech by printed pamphlets was a key factor in violent American revolution.
And there's no such thing as a brain virus. Now you're just making things up.