[hnnameblah365]

The enragement alone isn't the concern. Social media can enrage people at a previously unattainable scale and speed, and with less central authority (proxy for trust) than ever before.

Newspapers, magazines, and even TV don't measure up across all these contributing dimensions.

[balls187]

This is a key insight.

Tabloid Journalism is known to be sensational and easily dismissed as such because of the medium, and that people in our social circles don't often peddle anything more than the latest celebrity/sports gossip.

Social Media has allowed mis/disinformation to become more credible by both the scale of distribution for that content, and the increasing that contents trustworthiness by highlighting engagement from people in our social circles.

[ldbooth]

]I would also add that a journalist is accountable to their reputation and journalistic standards while an algorithm has no reputation to uphold and therefore can run wild under the surface with no accountability.

What if Skynet was a social media algorithm... could be a good basis for the Terminator origin story.

[Spivak]

Yes they do! There isn’t that much difference nowadays between cable news and edgy YT personalities. Old guard media has realized that they can’t compete with social media so they’re borrowing all the plays.

There is news in the newspaper and in the archives of news sites but what’s front and center is outrage bait opinion pieces from large personalities.

[balls187]

Cable News was theater well before the rise of Social Media.

Social Media didn't invent "sex* sells."

*Sex being the place holder for something that is controversial.

[rhacker]

So true.

My brother used to watch Fox News (ehh..) but I mostly avoided it just cause. Anyway I sat down to watch one day and everything had scantily clad women no matter what they were discussing. A lot of the time it was about a strip club that got permits in a city somewhere in small town usa. And the segment would basically focus on dancers (no nudity in the shots) but basically everything BUT an ad for going to said strip club, even though the words themselves was "this is ruining America" - the camera angles and everything was butts, boobs and legs.

Anyway that aside. One thing that social media has over cable news is - it's cable not everyone has it, while the internet is pretty much everywhere now.

[pjc50]

The Daily Mail "sidebar of shame" is also a spectacular example of this. They can simultaneously slut-shame celebrities while also advertising where you can buy the outfit in the photo.

Fox News notoriously has a preference for blondes: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/feb/20/women-fox-ne...

[Rule35]

> "'I'm strictly dickly … I love sex and I love men'. Former presidential candidate's daughter Meghan McCain opens up for Playboy interview." -- Quoted in the Daily Mail

I welcome a service that tells me which celebrities are hollow. I call it "news", give it a try.

Telling you where to buy their clothes is part of the schtick - "Paul is [an idiot], dressed in Gucci pants - $35.000 at ..."

[AnimalMuppet]

Social media also enrages at a much deeper level.

Say a newspaper printed something. You read it. You got angry. You wrote a letter to the editor and mailed it. Maybe a week later, they printed your letter. A few days later, someone you know saw your letter and commented to you that they thought you were right.

You see something on Facebook. You got angry. You wrote something in reply (perhaps with less thought than the letter to the editor, because it wasn't a once-every-few-years event). Five minutes later, likes comments start pouring in. Not just one person tells you they think you were right; ten people do. And they tell you in the next few minutes and hours, not days later. And they comment on each others' comments about your post.

You get massively more positive reinforcement for your outrage now than you did with newspapers. The outrage gets reinforced, socially ratified. You get praised for it.

It's not just that Facebook hands you more things to be outraged about (not all of them true). It's that the outrage takes much deeper hold in you, because it's reinforced so much.