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After Kirk shooting, Utah governor calls social media a “cancer.” Will we treat it like one? | We did not evolve to handle this, Utah governor says.


We did not evolve to handle this, Utah governor says.

It might also be good advice for the kinds of Extremely Online People who lead the country by posting social media threats to unleash the "Department of War" upon Chicago, shown burning in the background. One can point, of course, to the successes: The powerless can call out the lies of the powerful, they can gin up "color revolutions" to topple dictators, and they can publish their views with an ease and at a cost that not even the printing press—itself an extremely disruptive technology—could manage. On the flip side, of course, is all the "cancer": the floods of misinformation and bile, the yelling, the "cancel culture," the virtue signaling, the scams and hoaxes, the ethnic nationalism, the casual sharing of both gore and pornography, the buffoonish natures of the tech overlords who run too many of these services, and that feeling you get when you log in to Facebook and realize with a shock that your aunt is a closet racist.

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