"Open any social platform and the pattern emerges within seconds. A hot take designed to inflame. A video engineered to provoke. A headline that seems scientifically calibrated to make your blood pressure spike. The content isn't trying to inform you or entertain you in any traditional sense. The content is trying to make you mad enough to interact with it."
"The economics of attention have made anger the most valuable emotional response a platform can extract from you. Not the most pleasant response, not the most thoughtful, but the most profitable. And once that equation gets built into the algorithms that decide what you see, the entire information ecosystem bends toward making you furious."
"Platforms discovered early on that engagement, measured in clicks, shares, comments, and time spent, was the metric that mattered for advertising revenue. A 2018 study from MIT found that false news stories spread six times faster on Twitter than true ones, and the pattern held across every category of information. The researchers concluded that novelty, particularly novel information that triggered strong emotional reactions, was the key driver of virality."
"Internal research from Facebook, disclosed as part of the Frances Haugen documents in 2021, showed that the company's own data scientists had concluded that content provoking anger and outrage generated significantly more engagement than positive or neutral content. One internal memo noted that the algorithm was prioritizing divisive and polarizing material because those were the posts that kept people on the platform longer."
Social platforms increasingly present content designed to provoke anger rather than inform or entertain. Hot takes, engineered videos, and scientifically styled headlines aim to trigger strong emotional reactions that lead to interaction. Engagement metrics such as clicks, shares, comments, and time spent drive advertising revenue, so platforms optimize for the emotions that maximize those metrics. Research found false news spreads faster than true news, with novelty and strong emotional responses linked to virality. Internal findings from major platforms indicate anger and outrage generate more engagement than neutral or positive content, and algorithms prioritize divisive material to keep users scrolling longer. This creates a feedback loop that bends the information ecosystem toward fury.
Read at TheSavvyGamer
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