I think they are a symptom, not the root. The root started before them with the advent of pay per click advertising. Everything else has spiraled from that. I truly believe that the massive divisiveness of the last 2 decades can be traced to this. Social media echo chambers, youtube rabbit holes, click baity headlines, all of it is because of pay per click advertising. The ML algorithms we have now have become so effective that the problem is only getting exponentially worse. Your news is fed to you with the sole purpose of making you click so they earn $.
As someone who started working at an ad agency during the online metrics boom, then went to a national news organisation to work as digital strategist, I tend to agree.
But I would pinpoint it to the inflated value of impressions. My experience (but i can not back this up) tells me that ad sellers tend to over estimate the impact of an impression, which makes the value chain completely inflated, and skews the business model. If ads were worth less (and, according to me, closer to the real value), less money would go round, and creating value for the end user would become more a necessity.
But I think calling it pay-for-click is a misnomer, that's just the latest version of a very old business model. Cable news, like Fox, has had the same outrage-fueled engagement metrics that predate the internet, and before them there were newspapers doing the same thing. I think the technology of social media is just creating small efficiencies in an existing business model preying on very old aspects of human nature.
I think the difference is that cable news is hard to access for a lot of people. For example, you don’t have ML algorithms on cable boxes trying to suggest a show which will result in high engagement. It’s fairly siloed, in that you have to deliberately choose to watch cable news. (Though they definitely keep you hooked!) Social media really allows it to be much more pervasive.
Annecdotally, Cable news seems to work just as effectively at confirming prior biases as social media among my relatives who don't have computers / smartphones, maybe even more effectively. I'm skeptical that the algorithms are so much better than people self sorting between news networks that it's a difference of kind rather than degree, and I think we give "the algorithms" way too much credit in general
Was this an internet age thing? I mean 24hour news networks found out long before social media took off that they can eat a bigger piece of the pie and not spend money working on news by running opinion hacks. Just decide which echo chamber you want to pander to and then fill up your schedule with pundits. Their market share went up, their costs went down and no matter what happens or doesn't happen each day, they have a group of people that want to tune in. People like to hear their world view reaffirmed.
Silicon valley just optimized it and turned it in to a science.
I'm sure various social scientists and historians could link it other issues. Advertising and selling goods in and of itself doesn't really explain how people just fall in to utter bullshit beliefs, does it?
The internet is a little different as on tv they cant follow you from channel to channel recommending things for you to watch. Tv shows cost a good deal of money to produce so the range of offerings is limited. On the internet, algorithms track your every click even to the point of noticing that you paused on a headline but did not click it. They are able to build a profile on you that is likely more accurate than anything ever created before including your understanding of yourself. With this profile they also have an almost unlimited supply of videos, articles and social media posts to send your way that your profile says you will likely click on. Each time you click on something their profile is updated and improved. They are able to create a steady stream of offered media that cannot help but reinforce your views on the world as you are quite often not presented with much of an alternative. If you are not a technical person and you are only presented with news that supports your political ideology you may very well think that everyone else is getting the same feed. This would make them think that if you are getting the same news as them and still hold a different viewpoint then you are being willfully ignorant and choosing to be malicious. See the rise of the "liberalism is a disease" meme. For example if all the news you see says Biden is senile and a terrible person, why would you not believe it? In the same way in which someone on the left was presented with a very negative feed of Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his nomination process. A good example of how powerful the ML algorithms are now is NBA player Kyrie Irving and his trip down the youtube rabbit hole that convinced him the earth was flat. He also holds Anti-Vax ideas, which were most likely influenced by his internet browsing habits.
