[ergothus]

> just get clicks

Just because you have one goal (in this case traffic) doesn't mean your actions dont have other effects.

Generate clickbait that, for example, leverages the distrust the public has in a group, or is based on the desire to see someone/some group get their comeuppance, or the desire to hear tales about how your group is being exploited, etc, and you start manipulating public opinion about those things.

Fox News, for example, started conservative but far less radical...I dont know if they were radicalized by the success of their own success by this sort of manipulation, but it is certainly an option.

Once you have success at manipulation, even if that wasn't actually your intent, a financial incentive appears to MAKE it your intention.

[munificent]

> Fox News, for example, started conservative but far less radical.

Fox News was created to be a GOP propaganda vehicle [0]. They've gotten more radical as the GOP has because that's why Fox News exists. There are interesting questions around whether the tail is wagging the dog, but I think the simplest, most accurate perspective is to treat Fox and the Republican Party as a single unit whose goal is always to maximize GOP power.

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/roger-ailes-blueprint-fox-ne...

[SiempreViernes]

I think intent is pretty important to the concept of "manipulation": you don't often hear the sun being accused of manipulating the weather, despite the overwhelming influence it has over it.

[vintermann]

Surely, to cause people to be angry and misinformed is bad whether it's part of the end goal or just for money through clicks.

I'd say it was worse a couple of years ago, though. It's as if there were a generation of young men and women in journalism who had grown up on Something Awful and 4chan, and whose main marketable skill were farming negative attention online. The craze for hiring that sort as "social media managers" have died off a little.

[ameister14]

That's because manipulate implies active control, which the sun doesn't have. As a different example, you can manipulate the levers of a machine and, if you are not skilled or paying attention, get a result you did not plan for.

[SiempreViernes]

That is simply poor manipulation: intent was there but understanding was lacking, and so the outcome was not as desired.

[ameister14]

an intent was there, but not the intent to create what became the eventual outcome. Buzzfeed has an intent - to create clicks. What GP was saying was that this creates an unintended effect, that of political and social manipulation, which unfortunately ends up as an incentivized loop for Buzzfeed.

[allovernow]

>Fox News, for example, started conservative but far less radical.

I think you're really stretching the definition of radical. That the views may be far from your own does not make them radical.

[ergothus]

It is absolutely true that views far from my own aren't automatically radical.

But the overdramatic "they are coming for YOU" rhetoric, (just as an example, I recall a lead into a discussion of food stamps that showed a fist punching through a map of the U.S.), the messianic treatment of Trump, the extreme yet hypocritical positions, these all lead me to conclude they've shifted to not just "from from me", but into radical.

I try to get news from multiple sources to reality-check my own biases, and I've regularly seen Fox report "facts" that no one else is, while avoiding big news that they don't like. I've seen them parrot lines from Breitbart and other sources that are widely considered unreliable and extreme. I've seen plenty of respectable conservative news outlets distance themselves from Fox News reporting more than once.

(There are studies that show that Fox viewers are less informed on issues than average, but those studies haven't done a good job on determining causation, and less informed does not equal radical, so I'm not basing my opinion on those.)