“A Dutch laboratory just proved what many of us feared: the rot is in the architecture. Researchers built a social platform stripped to bare essentials – 500 AI agents, no algorithms, no surveillance apparatus. Just the fundamental mechanics: post, follow, amplify.
The bots fractured into warring tribes within hours. A narrow elite captured all attention. Extremism flourished.
They tested remedies – chronological feeds, hidden metrics, deliberate bridges between groups. Every intervention failed. Some accelerated the decay. They changed the AI models entirely. The pattern STILL held.
It’s beyond content moderation or algorithm tweaking. What we’re witnessing is structural violence embedded in the foundation itself. These platforms were architected to exploit attention as raw material for profit.
Outrage generates engagement. Engagement generates data. Data generates revenue.
The dopamine pathways they manipulate don’t simply waste our time – I think they reconstitute our capacity for collective reasoning. In healthcare, where truth can mean the difference between life and death, this architecture is catastrophic.
The question before us is no longer “how do we fix social media?” It is: “who decides the terms of our digital existence, and in whose interests?”
LINK:: https://futurism.com/social-network-ai-intervention-echo-chamber
