Because the curating often creates a use of sources that exist as a primary vehicle for confirmation bias, where narrative, perspective, context, and fact selection or omission are all put into service of partisan or ideological ends.
Any space on the Internet, be that Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, or DU is not going to give someone a broad spectrum of objective information from a variety of views. It's going to give either what the algorithm figures you like, or you're already inhabiting a space where only a very narrow and specific band of views are considered.
The end result is being not very informed, even though one has the impression that they're greatly informed by virtue of the amount of content they're consuming. People don't know what they don't know - and they're extremely protective of that not knowing. Ever tried using a Wrong Source here for information, when the facts are simple, objective, and direct? Might as well set the thread on fire and walk away.
One of the problems in younger voters is that their information is curated for them, and most of them don't really take measures - nor are they taught by education systems to take them - to interrogate their sources. Whatever pops up in the spaces they inhabit can become internalized via passive consumption.
And I don't want to knock just young people here. Plenty of older adults who should absolutely know better are just as bad - if not worse in some spaces.
People don't know what they don't know. Which has always been true. However, we're entering an age where people are really happy about what they don't know, and they will fight to continue not knowing it.
That's the disturbing part.
= new reply since forum marked as read