[LeifCarrotson]

I fear that previously, trying to use money to tell people what to think was ineffective or inefficient, but now the cents-to-sentiments exchange rate is tipping too far.

When communication was one-to-one, you could hire someone to visit a target in person and advocate your position, which made sense only if your revenue from the advocacy was greater than the cost of the employee. Most of the time you wouldn't even start to do this because it would be dumb.

But now communication is now one-to-thousands and it's even cheaper to publish an idea than it used to be. If you can spend $100 to influence 10,000 people to give you $0.10 on average, that will be stupidly profitable, and greedy/amoral corporations will spend that money until the ROI is down to break-even.