| So much this: outrage measures as "engagement" And yes it affects Twitter as well. It seems to me that it takes "energy" to get people to change. Change being one of how they think about something, how they respond to something, or what they spend their time on. As far as I can tell, there are three very well known and very well studied energy pools that can be amplified and then tapped, one is fear, one is anger, and one is reward. With fear and anger, a process is set up to increase levels in the target, while simultaneously offering a solution vector (ie a change in behavior that will address the fear or anger). I am sure psyche majors can quote all sorts of work here on that aspect of things. For web companies, if your revenue is derived by ads, and you can only get people to click on your ads if they are looking at your page, it seems using fear and anger to drive people to page after page would be the best strategy to maximize their exposure to ads. "outrage measures as engagement" is a perfect summary of the effect. The feedback loops are horribly exploitative. |
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/27/analysis-trumps-faceb...