Is the tendency for devisive content to be promoted a quirk of certain social media platforms, or is something more inherent? I’d argue that people are more likely to click on something if it presents a message of, “You are under attack!!” as opposed to say, “Firefighter rescues kitten from tree!” because the former invokes more and more powerful emotions. Brains are designed to seek out and pay attention to threats, and I think even something like a print newspaper is going to be subject to that incentive, at least to a degree.

You're right. And it's both. But social media has greatly accelerated our ability to exploit/be vulnerable to that quirk of the human brain. Specifically, the promotion of content based on interaction alone is the problem. It's a policy choice by social media companies that has disastrous consequences for humanity.

Do you mean through state regulation, or just consumer choice?

Consumer choice and divestment. Brands are pulling out of Twitter, we need more of that from Meta and for them and/or consumers to recognize the dangers of using that platform. Consciousness-raising etc. People are recognizing the dangers of social media and centralization of the public square (though they may not use those terms), these platforms are hemorrhaging users, things are moving in the right direction. Musk and Spez are the best promoters of the fediverse we could ask for. And we need platforms like Fedi to mature and capture that audience. I think there's a balancing act here to make sure we have safe online spaces for people to participate in (that are federated) while allowing the expression of a diversity of viewpoints so we don't continue down the rabbit hole of polarization. One of the big problems with online public squares is the inability to tell intentions of commenters ie is that person genuinely "just asking questions" or is this a troll attempt? Reputation systems may help with this.

State regulation of this area is really tricky, all the proposals I've seen so far are pretty ripe for abuse by the government and I don't want to give them that kind of power. They also make it harder for smaller sites and federations to exist since regulatory burdens limit who can run social media sites to only companies with money to pay lawyers.