alt Hacker NewsSure that’s a factor. But I think it’s pretty obvious in reality that a lot of people are not having a good time in contemporary western society. Social media didn’t invent that.
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I think both can be true: there are issues with affordable housing and integration of immigrants. But at the same time parties are poisoning minds with mass-scale disinformation, propaganda, trolling, through social media. These are even more effective when issues already exist.
Sadly, some of the parties that are involved (tech bros, Russia, etc.) are not going to do any good when it comes to these issues. They'll only make the housing issues worse (by accumulating even more wealth and invading your country, respectively). But blaming everything on immigrants and elites has always worked extremely well, in-group vs. out-group is something that our brain needed for survival in the past, so it is very easy to trigger.
The saddest part is that those that push the anti-elite narrative (Trump, Musk, etc.) are often the elites themselves.
> Social media didn’t invent that.
Hence why I started with "fanning the flames". It means the issues are there, they need to be worked on but with social media we are stuck, solving complex issues require compromises, long-term thinking and planning, nothing that is enabled by social media's knee-jerk reactions, ephemeral messaging, etc.