for all twitter's flaws, I don't believe there's anything about social media in particular that forces bad behavior any more than any other kind of speech. sure, the heuristics are such that dunking gets views, but i think people who make strong claims about being "forced" to act a certain way just want to be absolved of their choice to not read the clarifying tweet of the guy who worded something badly, or compartmentalize the fact that other people don't share their esoteric and miserable beliefs-- and that's on them. a lot of the problems decried as "twitter brain rot" present themselves in other communities, too-- being on twitter for however long doesn't automatically break you.
however, i do believe that living in a suburb for more than a few consecutive years of your adult life spawns termites that eat your brain raw
Force bad behavior, no. But people are drawn to power, and that includes popularity and social clout, and Twitter is designed in such a way that the people who get the most views and reshares are the people who can incite anger and outrage the fastest.
Anger's addictive, no one's immune to that. It's still their own choice to participate in a website that encourages it, but there's also not many popular social media sites that don't, and I honestly don't know how else most people are supposed to find community or get adequate views for their self-published work nowadays.
I may have avoided most of the popular sites and taken the backroads to get to Cohost, myself, but it took me a long lonely time to pull that off and I'm still not 100% certain how I feel about that.
(For the record, I'm not saying it's not individual people's own responsibility on some level. I personally just withhold more ire for the capitalists who are well aware of people's addictions and have no qualms with stirring up anger and abuse for their own profit.)
