Social Media Monoculture

Social media feeds are full of niche content tailored to your interests. One pitfall of this is that it may seem like there is a monoculture, because all of the content you are consuming contains the same handful of themes. But not everyone agrees with the things you see on your feed. If you were to consciously keep count, there are maybe a few dozen content creators comprising the main ideas in your feed. That is a rounding error compared to the actual size of the human population.

This creates a very polarizing illusion. In reality there are countless unique perspectives held by humans, but every individual on social media thinks the content on their feed is all that exists. So encountering an idea even slightly outside of your niche echo chamber seems shockingly extreme. It’s worth remembering that there are billions of people each with their own functioning consciousness, and there are bound to be differences in belief.