[smackeyacky]

I don't see the clickbait / extremism promoting content as anything particularly new. In the UK the "red top" newspapers used to supply it and in the recent past it was Fox News.

It was always possible to cocoon yourself into news and opinion you agreed with.

AI slop does seem a little different, if only because it's machine generated and the sheer amount of it would not have been possible when rubbish was human generated and the gatekeepers of publishing were newspaper editors.