So social media is not primarily a place of public discussion of ideas. The ideas are ways to define oneself and signal belonging to a group, as well as to assign identities to others by associating them with groups you oppose.
Jesse Rice in The Church of Facebook noted that building one's identity in the social sphere was a form of co-creation, or of participating in God's management of the world, dispensation. That thought has always stuck with me and is here echoed in Chris Bail's book Breaking the Social Media Prism.