[twiceaday]

Its the media (or more generally group dynamics) too. One side exaggerates how nasty the other side is, which gets people outraged and engaged, then they act nasty to them because its 'justified.' It also creates a feedback loop where regardless of what the other side did originally they are now much more likely to be nasty to your side simply because you were nasty to them. Maximizing engagement like this necessarily destabilizes discourse. There is a huge monetary incentive to maximizing engagement, while there is only a mild philosophical one to stabilizing discourse, so guess which one loses.

[beej71]

IMHO this nails it.

I finally caved to one of those "balanced news" sites because someone had a 50%-off sale. They have a feature where you can see news stories that are being ignored by either liberal or conservative outlets.

It's damned fascinating, tempered by the fact that it's also damned terrifying that the populace as a whole is being controlled by it... and also that the future President of the US is trying to control it.

But maybe that's just me falling into the trap TFA talks about. :)