Have "likes" and "kudos" polarized our society?

[RoadRunner79]

Obviously I'm not the first one with this idea, but is this common social media format part of what's responsible for the divided in our society?

You join a social group, and get addicted to the stimuli of people liking your stuff. Then the more liberal or conservative or atheist or religious or whatever your little niche group is, the more likes you get, which socially engineers your opinions to line up that way also. Hence everybody ends up living in political or religious bubbles because of basically getting stuck in a loop of positive feedback.

The more I've thought about it, I think this is probably the number one reason that our society is so divided right now, people don't even want to venture outside of their normal comfort zone because there are no "likes" to be had for them out there.

Also I've noticed that on here one of the easiest ways to get kudos is attacking someone who co mes in with an opposing opinion.  I'm sure it's the same on every platform. This spills over to real life, you get conditioned to attack opposing opinions.

Are the machines programming us?

Thoughtful replies appreciated.

While I'm sure that you can get into the nuances and the subject is a lot more complicated, I'd basically agree.  It seems to me, that since social media, there appears to be a lot more polarization within society.  I think that it makes your fringe groups stronger and louder.  It also does seem like attacking a person, as well as fake news (or real news, but blowing it out of context and out of proportion) is much more acceptable.

While there are benefits of social media, I don't know that overall, it will be a good thing for society.