@baslow To put it as briefly as possible, capitalistic social media have offered an excellent territory for hostile disinformation agencies for years, and will keep doing so until they’re dismantled (or bankrupt).
On one hand, the sociological tradition of the University of Chicago is mostly qualitative (interview, field research), rejecting statistics, which offers an excellent complement to the intensive quantitative data capitalistic social media get on their users. On the other hand, I’m not even sure they’d need to read Goffman; they could just correlate how profitable a user is with how many times they click on links, or on the "show more" button, or watch videos, per hour, and draw their own conclusions (links are bad, long posts are bad, videos are bad), without even developing a general correlation between cognitive resources and Goffman’s total institutions.
@baslow What I mean here of course is that by degrading culturally cognitive resources so much, they offer an excellent territory for hostile disinformation agencies. And as you can see in your TL, I think Mastodon does too; even if Trump didn’t think about all of this, (maybe he was just looking for a successful Twitter clone?), he found in Mastodon, rather than XMPP, Telegram, or even Matrix, the tool he needed to spread lies and deceive/abuse his followers.
