But it's so much than that. It pushes each individual for clicks regardless of it's true or not. It's AI and has no conscience or reasoning for right and wrong. It just wants to creates users to sell to their clients (advertising). If you seeing a article on Trump killing unicorns and will get you to click then that's what it will send to you. Click on it and you'll see more articles on similar. Meanwhile real news gets buried because it generates much less clicks than sensationalism.
They also show a huge correlation to social media and the rise of depression and suicides of many of the same reasons.
A local "celebrity" was liking and reposting all sorts of stupid covid-19 conspiracy crap (and a bunch of similar health-crap earlier) and was finally cornered by a reporter and asked wtf she was doing and if she actually believed that shit. Answer? No, she didn't believe it, but it gave her a bunch of clicks and was basically how she was earning her money.
My point... it's not just algorithms that will push crap for money, people are more than willing to do so as well.
Some of my favorite sites do A/B testing on article headlines and "engagement" measurements. They've been fairly open about it and the results are just depressing. The non-informative click-bait headlines consistently garner more clicks and the controversial (non-)topics score better in both clicks and engagement than real in-depth news and analysis.
Until the majority of people stop acting like idiots, we'll all be treated like idiots.
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