I haven't seen much discussion on this topic, and I'm hoping the discussion follows from this post will result in actionable insight. Or it may be that I am being overly pessimistic.

Over the past couple of years there has been an amalgam of factors resulting in people living in their own bubbles of truth. I suspect this trend has been fuelled by a concerted effort by skilled state actors to divide people in the US, and the west in general. These groups have been given near free rein by Facebook, YouTube et al. to run highly sophisticated campaigns to maximize chaos and destroy civil discourse. I understand that Facebook et al. are trying to prevent this, but as someone who has a PhD in Deep Learning, I am high skeptical of the ability of ML/DL/AI/Whatever to combat such actors. I feel like we are at a stage where someone's idea of truth has been so tightly strangled by their social media intake that if you were to send a flat-earther to space on a rocket, they would declare the experience as fake and fabricated. Today, watching the supreme court judge nominee say that climate change was debatable, when in fact it, man made or not, it is an irrefutable fact, really made me feel pessimistic about this whole situation. If we continue on this path, and I struggle to see a way out, it seems almost inevitable that we are heading into a situation where the damage done will be too great to remedy.

People watch over 114 THOUSAND YEARS of youtube per a day, some of that might be educational, but the majority of that is thanks to the algorithm playing with their limbic system, sending them down yet another rabbit hole, and people in general are complete slaves to their limbic system. How do we stop this? How do we prevent the probable unravelling of civil discourse as a result of everyone having their own version of truth?