And because social media platforms incentivize controversial opinions that get lots of engagement, even if most of it is disagreement. Twitter's particularly bad for this because of it's default-public-broadcast nature, but you'll see this in public Facebook posts as well. (eg, I have a friend who is a state-level politician, and I made the mistake of reading the comments in one of his posts, and they're all sub-human trolls. You know; you look at the profile and there's no content. Just 'evocative images' like stylized pictures of the constitution and the US flag, but no original content, no grandkids pictures, etc).
And because social media platforms incentivize controversial opinions that get lots of engagement, even if most of it is disagreement.
IMO this puts the carriage before the horse: the platforms incentivize engagement, sans enough social pressure to actually tackle it, the platform seems not to care much what that engagement looks like, and this is what we get.
I agree, and I used to make this same technology-neutral point, but I figure we might as well call a spade a spade at this point, since it's obvious what we get.
