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by chillacy
2152 days ago
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Traditional news media is also organized by engagement: an entire department is responsible for picking the home page of a newspaper and importance of each story. The major publications do a better job at not sensationalizing everything, but this has been a problem since 1890 at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism That social media naturally tends to become a tabloid magazine may be more a reflection on readers than the editor (whether human or machine). |
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The reason it became so pronounced is that social media got very good at it and then taught the lesson to traditional media. They, too, now use metrics of engagement to choose what they show.
It is true also that it is a weakness of people. But there are other weaknesses that we regulate in the interest of a healthy society.
I'm not a fan of regulation but a general awareness of the core issue would go a long way towards a solution.
Right now, the talk about the issue seems misdirected. I can only see the proposed solutions putting immense power of controlling narrative in a few hands.