The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?

Misinformation, trolling, anger, tribalism... and it's all because of social media, right? Maybe not in the way you're thinking. Kurzgesagt explains how these psychological forces have been around as long as humankind has existed. That doesn't make it right, but we've developed a system in which we cling to the people around us, listen to them and learn how to be like them, and use social constraints to get along with them even when we don't get along with them. In the same way, we learned to distrust outsiders who we perceived as not like us. Social media indeed changed all that, because it gave us all a much bigger platform to express ourselves without the constraints of having to face our neighbors. The tribalism we developed for our communities has expanded across the world, but so have the number of our perceived enemies. We haven't yet learned to to give faceless strangers online the same courtesies we would to our immediate neighbors, nor do we have time to get to know them as we should. So we can blame social media for the intensity and the reach of our worst behavior, but the forces that have been unleashed were with us all along.