Addressing a few points raised in comments:<p>1. The drumbeat of criticism against major information-technology-centric, largely media-based firms, has been palpably increasing. As a long-term critic, this is oddly disconcerting. Calls for regulation are increasing in the US and elsewhere. Critics include numerous former (and some current) employees, or executives, of major tech companies, including Sean Parker, former president of Facebook.<p>2. The dynamics and interactions of media, the public, tribalistic impulses, and politics (as well as other phenomena) are an ancient study, though one apparently not much focused on by many working in information technology: programmers, system architects, sysadmins, DBAs, network engineers, designers, UI/UX specialists, product managers, etc. Which is ironic because that really <i>is</i> our melieu.<p>There's a very large literature on this topic and I very much recommend getting up to speed on the topic.<p>MOOC ICS has a good, fast-paced introduction. I've been commenting on HN and elsewhere of my own explorations: Robert McChesny, Noam Chomsky, I.F. Stone, Marshall McLuhan, H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann, Gustav la Bon, Davic MacKay, Cicero, Aristotle, and Plato are among the authors I'd recommend.<p>First video (apologies, I cannot find the playlist link):
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhGPbjxy2F8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhGPbjxy2F8</a><p>3. "Technology" is a tremendously unsatisfactory term for the many meanings and connotations we give it. It's become synonymous in large part with "inforamtion technology" (though writ broadly it concerns far more). But if you <i>do</i> look at information technology, <i>that</i> field can largely be divided in two: media, directed at collecting and directing information from and to people, and cybernetics, directed at monitoring and managing non-human systems (including technical, engineering, financial, and governmental systems). Looking at each of these more closely even those distinctions start disappearing over the underlying similarities.<p>But the upshot is that a tremendous amount of what "technology" is is really the new "media". And yes, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Wordpress, Spotify, Snapchat, and similar companies are largely <i>media</i> or <i>communications</i> companies in the same sense that Western Union, AT&T, RCA, CNN, or Time-Life Publishing, are. But bigger, faster, and with orders of magnitude more audience.<p>And the less-directly-media-oriented companies -- Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft -- still have media-like components, though they play in other spaces as well.<p>4. The current tech giants didn't invent disinformation, misinformation, distraction, propaganda, and manipulation. But they've made it vastly more powerful, targeted, sophisticated, large, and rapidly-evolving. They've also denied this up and down and blue for years, with all the credibility of the lead, asbestos, tobacco, automobile, CFC, coal, and oil industries. Which is to say: nil.<p>Not <i>inventing</i> a problem doesn't mean you're not embodying or exacerbating it.