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.
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.
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.
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.
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.