The idea of like you could always not as the first rule of the internet, I love. With children, it is all about attention and dopamine and these tiny feedback loops. So we've entered the toilet word phase of my five-year-old's life. And social media has never left that phase. The people who run social media platforms, they want to be seen as liberators. They want to be Seen as taking down the gatekeepers. We are disrupting. We're innovating. These people have this immense power and responsibility to be shaping people's behavior. But sometimes, and it doesn't happen all the time, I can get to a root cause and say, okay,
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