As long as we have a higher arousal slot machine based information system, there will be people who will be radicalized by it in various ways. It seems like Kanye West, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, a lot of people have exhibited similar symptoms of what you could call algorithmic brain poisoning. I spent a lot of time with people who were brought down a particular rabbit hole of male supremacy, white supremacy and anti-Semitism. But when I saw Kanye West going down this path, I could immediately almost guess, almost like a bingo card. He's thinking, given what he had been looking at before, it was not very hard for me to see where the algorithms would push him next
The internet can be a wonderful, but also a terribly unpleasant place. Andrew Marantz knows this well. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker who spent three years embedded in the world of internet trolls to understand how regular people propel fringe talking points into the heart of online conversations. In this episode, he shares how ideas spread on the internet – and what we can do to make our digital experiences less about doom-scrolling, and more about real human connection. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts