Around 2015 someone (most likely Cambridge Analytica) found out that to drive engagement, all you need is outrage. Ever since, it has influenced online discourse and politics worldwide. It’s been a downright paradigm shift: suddenly the objective truth doesn’t matter anymore. Reality is malleable. Once you realize this you see it everywhere: engagement bait, usually in the form of outrage porn. That’s the first step. The second one is echo chambers and polarization.
Someone simply figured out how human brains worked and hijacked the system behind it. That’s it, that’s the whole deal. The world’s best psychologists aren’t employed by medical companies or in academia; they’ve been hired by venture capitalists to find every possible flaw in the human psyche, in order to identify and then weaponize those, ad infinitum. This is not a battle than can be won by fact-checking and calling for decorum.
We’ve been at war for our very attention and insight for almost a decade, we’re losing badly and no one even understands, let alone has a constructive way to fight back.
I’m just glad I got my parents trained enough to immediately contact me for anything that seems “off”. The result is that they panic needlessly almost daily, but I still prefer that over getting the dreaded “they emptied all our accounts” call.