It seems to me that an enormous amount of social media content consists of ideological plagiarism. It is just an inordinate number of people who have coalesced around a particular set of polarized perspectives , and then trade volleys back and forth using other people’s arguments and talking points as if they are their own. They become partisan cannons shooting off the ammunition they are being fed by “influencers” and pundits.
Very few original or independent ideas are being exchanged. So many people have become unpaid spokesmen, distributing pre-packaged ideas of others. To some extent, this has even become an entrepreneurial endeavor. If you can be particularly charismatic or persuasive in your recital of this or that script, maybe you can gain popularity, advertisers, or even funding from the partisan organisations that draft the original dogmas. This happens on the Right and the Left.
The accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands is not as dangerous as the accumulation of power over the framing of public discourse in fewer and fewer hands, and I fear that is what is happening. We are thinking less, consuming a narrower array of thoughts, and then regurgitating what we have received as though these ideas sprang from our own minds; when actually they pass through our minds without much processing, and get passed on by means of our own negligent sense of urgency to opine about everything, without doing any genuine intellectual work.