Algorithms on social media deliberately increase division in society. Being consciously created to attract as many people as possible, they focus on the information that people respond to with high emotions, outragement, or confirmation bias. This contributes to filter bubbles that expose individuals to only opinions that match their current views and prevents them, as well as the society, from looking at a wide range of perspectives.
These algorithms contribute a lot to the speed of the misinformation. The false factoids, whether they are promoted as information or entertainment can be viewed, clicked and shared more than the true data. This virality favored by the algorithms would compel questionable information to large audiences in a short period of time. This is compromising the standing up of a common ground of facticity.
Polarization and misinformation are directly connected. Polarization increases the vulnerability of the users to the misled division by the group. At the same time, misunderstandings serve to reinforce polarization through demonization of other groups, as well as by reinforcing group biases. This merry-go-round greatly destroys confidence in the institutions and contributes to the social conflict.
The core of this issue is the platform algorithms. They have a primary role to endow their users with maximum attention and interaction. The very nature of this business model encourages exclusivity and sensation coverage rather than accuracy and welfare of society. The design decisions lead directly to the enhancement of polarization and the spread of misinformation.
This is why social media algorithms serve as the mighty engines perpetuating the divisions in society and manipulating the information ecosystems. The logic of their operations is to repeatedly prioritise divisive content and lies because they have a better chance of encouraging engagement. This literally dismembers the communal discourse and the common denominator.
Conclusion:
Resources and means of ensuring the spread of misinformation and a polarization of society are generated by social media algorithms. Their click-based algorithms generate separation through filter bubbles and promote bombastic, incendiary, frequently untrue information to achieve the broadest coverage. This has a direct impact of fragmenting the discourse in the wider society, breaking trust in various institutions and weakening common ground in factual reality. This problematic issue of algorithmic amplification of weeds of divisive or misleading content is neither a bug nor an accident in platform models that so often dominate markets.