Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8503362" data-attributes="member: 18">For me I'd say an issue we've seen before, which is media companies benefiting materially from promoting extreme opinions and pushing them to people who might be vulnerable is appearing in a new form.Like with "Yellow Journalism" in the 1890s through 1930s, which was full of insane extremist rhetoric, outright lies, conspiracy theories and so on, the material benefit was $$$ from paper sales and adverts in those papers. This time social media companies were happy to benefit from promoting and encouraging ("unintentionally" via algorithms and personal-data-targeting but there's no way they didn't know it was happening) really extreme opinions because it "increased engagement", and let them sell personal data, targeted advertising, or just advertising in general.Public pressure and complaint seemed to have little impact until government regulators around the world started making noises, when we suddenly saw changes - the issues aren't fixed - the obsession with engagement and reliance on a model where their funding is absolutely based on engagement will always lead to promoting whatever increases that - but the situation did improve slightly.</blockquote>