Social media

Anything that involves forcing you to identify yourself to engage on the internet will only harm regular people. We deserve our privacy and anonymity. More on reddit.com

One of my favorite podcasters is Dan Carlin, a radio host turned political commenter, amateur historian, and amateur journalist. While he's best known for Hardcore History, which features many-hour-long, deep-dives on historical areas of great interest, he's also been hosting Common Sense for about 14 or 15 years now. Something he's said relatively recently on Common Sense that's really stuck with me is how terribly difficult it is to judge history when you're in it. Some of the greatest thinkers, political scientists, journalists, politicians, historians, and philosophers have tried to come up with larger themes or ideas about the era in which they lived, and the results are deeply inconsistent and unreliable. Even with the benefit of access to highly reliable information and nearly-objective analysis by experts, it's incredibly difficult to determine something about the history we're living, because we're missing the necessary ingredient of perspective. Time and distance grant perspective. Applied to your question specifically, we're looking at an emergent technology and social shift which already has made irrevocable marks across hundreds of cultures. Addictive social media which is purpose-built to gather data for the purpose of improving marketing, the immaculate presentation of a curated life for the judgment of others, the increasingly (deliberately) addictive nature of social media technology, algorithmic radicalization for of preferred content for increased engagement leading to radicalized perceptions of the world and beliefs... also unprecedented connectivity, the creation of an entirely different kind of community, great geographical distances between loved ones melting away instantly... it's huge. We're not in a position to say, in aggregate, if social media is more harm or more good, and we probably won't be in a place to realistically reach a judgment for decades. I wouldn't trust even people who are emergent experts on social media to make that kind of grand determination. It's too soon to tell. More on reddit.com

The media holds a lot of blame for how divided America is.

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Though I agree with most of your premisses except for #3 (I won't comment on that here unless asked as another comment has already brought it up), I think there is an interesting potential counter point to your title about it being the worst thing: We're experiencing civilizational growing pains and in the long run the advent of social media is a step, albeit a clumsy one, toward positive hyperconnectivity that will allow us to progress ever faster. We're learning how to talk to one another on previously unimaginable scales. We're learning what works and what is toxic, how to promote, dispel, and change ideas, how to communicate and cooperate with communities spread across space (and maybe through time). And though our first implementations of this hyperconnectivity are rather poor, misaligned, and amplify many of the communication problems ingrained in us from our more rudimentary systems (tribalism, addiction, etc), this amplification could help us (and I would argue has helped us) become more aware of our communicative failures and will likely lead to improvements in future iterations. In short, being able to connect with anyone on the planet at any time is not intrinsically a bad thing, we're just pretty bad at it at the moment, but just as individuals must learn as they make mistakes so must societies and software, and if we do then it is a step in the right direction. More on reddit.com