[joe_the_user]

Anything that moves us from away from the over-used "you are the product" metaphor. Especially good to back-up from the idea that just paying for media means you'll less likely to be manipulated.

That said, once we start to talk about "manipulation", things get very relative. Human beings are social animals. I want to have contact with other people and so be influenced by them? At some point we can call some influence manipulation but there's a lot of gray areas. "Make my feed better" is a key grey area. Filtering crap from the Internet is one of the biggest jobs of both Facebook and Google. At some points that filtering becomes self-serving censorship but there are lots of gray areas. The biggest thing is that isn't a static problem - creators of viral manipulation products and ideologies get more and more sophisticated as methods evolve (articles on QAnon as gamification are worth reading). Not that Facebook and Google are blameless but it seems a ultra-networked worked, there's going to be multiple powerful forces and filters competing for influence and which one is "evil" is a difficult call.