Social media makes social and political life very public. People are less reliant on self-esteem and more dependent on validation from others. The sharing of ideas also easily attacks lessons from the past, which dilutes valuable, learned knowledge from other humans.
"Our cultural ancestors were probably no wiser than us, on average, but the ideas we inherit from them have undergone a filtration process. We mostly learn of ideas that a succession of generations thought were worth passing on. That doesn’t mean these ideas are always right, but it does mean that they are more likely to be valuable, in the long run, than most content generated within the past month." – Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell