Nah, it doesn't work that way. That's subtle whataboutism.

You confuse objective facts with misinformation.
You also confuse "I know more" with "I know better".
Furthermore, the concept of "freedom" has been torn, mangled, abused, twisted, shred, fed to pigs, their excretion reprocessed and fed to pigs again, until there's nothing recognizable left.
Sure, people are free to think whatever the fuck they want, as long as it's not materialized as illegal activities, meaning they are free to think whatever their mind poops, but they are NOT allowed to do whatever they think. There are legal limitations, you know.

In a way, you are both correct.
Critical thinking in population, as a whole, is largely the same, statistically speaking. I'd go as far as saying it somewhat improved in time, say, compared to 20, 30, 50 years ago.
At the same time, Social media, as an intercommunication tool, is, in theory, a good thing. It allows people to find others alike, establish likeminded groups, easily exchange information, etc.

The problem is compounded.
1. Information on social media is not curated. Anyone can excrete the hugest whopper and spread it around like organic fertilizer on the field.
2. The field itself is very fertile. The advance and cheapening of technology made it very easy for pretty much everyone to access Social media, which if filled to the brim with uncurated information. Petri dish, meet mold.
3. Nobody tries to filter said misinformation at the source. Social media corps would often engage in the proverbial own chest beating, but the sad reality is they don't give a flying fuck for many, many reason, the core one being as simple as possible: it makes them a shit-ton of money.

I've been on Facebook for 15 years now. I've seen it slowly degrade and decompose. Right now, about a third of all ads I see in my feed are scams, deepfakes, misleading, outright lies and so on. Not to be confused with "I don't like them". They are objectively false. Therefore, for the last few months, I started reporting the biggest offenders.
Do you know how many of those egregiously fake reported ads were removed?
Zero.
Invariably, no matter what, the response is "We’ve taken a look and found that this ad doesn’t go against our Advertising Standards."
Again, just to be clear: I am talking about painfully obvious AI-based deepfake ads, asking people to "invest" in this or that, using deepfaked footage of prime ministers or known anchormen, basically organized scams. None of them were even acknowledged by Facebook as problematic, let alone banned.
There's the occasional (although a lot rarer) hard porn ad squeezing through; the video section has turned into a shitfest; the whole platform is basically anarchy right now.

To summarize: Social Media, by itself, is not a problem. People, by themselves, are not a problem either. But when you have billions of, ahem, "less gifted" people sucking at the teat of putrid misinformation, well... THAT is the problem right there.

Thank you for explaining. I was dumbfounded when I read "$132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold". That made no sense to me.
But if they factor in the "ancillary" costs, yeah, it would make sense.

Or even abuse it seems.

That's the exact opposite of how it actually works. Fertility rates tend to be highest among socioeconomically challenged groups, and lowest among high earning groups.

The lack of clear English isnâ(TM)t the frustrating thing with modern day customer "service". I have lived in non-English speaking locales and can roll with a language barrier. The problem is outsourced customer "service" ain't empowered to do a damn thing except read from a script and by the time I'm frustrated enough to make a call it's invariably for a problem too complicated to solve with a script. AI will not fix this problem. It will just leave you yelling at a disempowered computer rather than a disempowered human being. The solution to this problem would require the C-Suite thinking of customer service as SERVICE rather than a pointless expense to be minimized.

OK. What about "Don't use Telnet"?

I've never had a problem reading Chinese or Japanese books or watching movies. Yes, translation of idioms is always problematic, particularly from languages that are not related to our own, but a good translator can usually deal with that. For me, the problem with The Three Body Problem was the loopy plot, shallow characters and the author's abrupt genre jumping. I'm reasonably familiar with the Cultural Revolution and its profound effect on Chinese society, so ironically, reading the first chapter was the best part of the book. There was an interesting story there that wasn't a science fiction story.

Yeah, it is a silly analysis without comparison to the alternative.

Even totally ignoring the environment, Californians bought 13.6 billion gallons of gasoline in 2022. At a cost of $4.50 that's $61.2B per year on gasoline, every year, forever, until we invest in other options. $20B towards kicking that habit - permanently - isn't necessarily unreasonable.

Of course there are some recurring costs to maintain the grid (though a non-upgraded grid might be higher or lower, I don't know), and other costs to electric switchover such as, obviously, generating clean power.

But simply saying - "Ooooh, $20B, big number!" is more misleading than informative.

As the person who has been responsible for responding to law enforcement video requests and occasionally (three times) testifying as to that process and their authenticity, it's exceptionally rare (never personally seen it) for CCTV footage alone to convict someone. Most of the time it leads the police to a suspect, usually because someone they know recognized them (not for nothing that the police frequently publish these videos/images) and then the idiot convicts themselves by talking to the cops (pro-tip, never do this). Less frequently it leads to other witnesses and/or evidence that gets them convicted.

Most of the time it doesn't do a damn thing because the crime in question isn't worth the police resources to follow up on, even if you have something pretty damning, like a legible license plate.

If AI enhancement results in more arrests for crime, I'd wager it comes about largely through the police releasing the enhanced images to the media, with the suspect(s) then being outed by their friends/family. Cops go talk to the suspect, he's an idiot and thinks he can outsmart them, and ends up saying incriminating things. Same as today, it'll just be higher quality images on the local news.

And porn. I knew I saved all those early aughts videos for a reason. ;-)

This is some racist ass bullshit and the people modding it up should be ashamed of themselves.

If you want to condemn India for something, condemn them for copying the worst parts of American capitalism.

Tell me, how many Indians do you see here? I count zero. You might be able to claim one, if you discount the fact that Ms. Amuluru is a natural born US citizen, about as Indian as I am German, but whatever, even if you include her I doubt very much she was a decision maker when it came to the aggressive cost cutting -- err, I mean "optimization" -- that lead to this, this, or this.

I don't really think it's incumbent on me to prove to you that the perspectives of myself and others are valid.

That said, have you tried to find a non-astroturfed product review for literally anything these days? Have you not noticed how Google -- who used to have the philosophy of getting you off their page as quickly as possible -- has plastered search results with "panels", using data stolen, err, I mean "borrowed", from actual webpages, and frequently directing you to other Google products and services? The last bit is the straw that broke the anti-trust camel's back on both sides of the Atlantic.

That's just Search. If you've worked with G-Suite/Workspace, you're well aware of the anti-consumer changes they've made to that product over the years. If you've come to rely on any Google products as part of your personal or professional workflow, you've probably had the discomforting experience of having the rug pulled out from under you. Is it really a wonder how they managed to go from being hip, cool, and disruptive, to the focus of so much ire?

I weirdly prefer working with Microsoft, despite their countless flaws/problems, and that's saying a lot. If you had told me 10 years ago that I'd feel that way I would have laughed in your face and asked how high you were. Hell, I became an Apple user because of a multitude of negative experiences with Nexus phones, specifically, the complete lack of QA/QC Google maintained over that flagship product line. Dismiss this as an anecdote if you want, it's not, the Nexus 6P ended in a class action lawsuit, countless people had the same lousy experience I did. Android had me for nearly a decade. If you had told me at any point prior to October 2016 I'd end up an iPhone user, again, I'd have laughed in your face.

If the products still work for you, great, but don't discount the multitude of voices saying they're inferior to yesterday's products and deeply frustrating to use.

3) It will undoubtedly be used to push ads nobody except the MBA asshats asked for.