This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Ragebaiting is extremely powerful as an engagement tactic. I have seen so many instances of people fully admit that they know they are being ragebaited and still engage anyway because they feel they "must say something".
It sounds simple, but being able to say "No, I'm not getting involved with this" is a very helpful skill to have when using the modern internet. Don't let them drag you through the muck for clicks or views.
That's nothing new. we've known this for the better part of two decades now. Ever since facebook and youtube started promoting controversial content in their feeds
Even though I keep blocking those sort of pages and users, I still get constantly presented with far right garbage on Facebook. It's awful, and I wish this shit was made illegal.
Fuck Zuckerberg and Musk and all those tech CEO-bros pieces of shit.
Only far right? I get the same type of garbage from both the far right and far left. I stopped using Facebook a year ago in part because I couldn't block it all.
Mostly far right. Some far left.
Well, it is "For You" then, isn't it? Not "Here's what you want" but "here's what the algorithm has chosen For You". For You: a bespoke, tailored, never-ending torrent of content that we have picked out based on the relentless automated psychoanalysis we carry out every second of ever day based on every swipe, zoom and key press to keep you outraged, distracted and malleable with the absolute bare minimum of entertainment and dopamine. Bon appetit.
I still have Facebook for some unknown reason. No matter how many right wing group/pages I select not interested and block they continue to fill my feed. And I've determined all that social media is for now is rage bait. So I've stopped engaging the troll farms. And until society as a whole stops engaging they'll continue to keep posting it
The PNAS article, Epstein says, is not a finger-pointing exercise but an encouragement for dialogue on new research and remedies
I don't think dialogue will help when Big Tech intentionally uses this stalling technique. Or that this is a bug to be remedied.
Like so much technology, it's ruined by capitalism. Content algorithms could be amazing resources if what your algorithm thought you wanted was transparently displayed and easily edited.
Oh fuck off article author, every outlet does this and everyone knows it! It's been this way for a century probably
This is not like the days of old where television/radio/newspapers pushed their opinions to the public en masse. It's social media, where everything is tailored to you, personally, available to you on your personal device that you carry with you everywhere 24/7, and it makes it so much harder to resist it.
That couldn't happen with the mass media of old. It wasn't tailored for you, so there were enough rough edges that you could stop and say "Hey, this guy's an asshole!" and break the loop. It wasn't with you all the time , sneaking in during that 30 second scroll of your phone when you're bored.
Now, it's continuous reinforcement where a tiny aspect of your profile matches a tiny part of their message, so you see it in your feed, and then it slowly cycles you through more and more of what they want you to see, until your interests match their interests and their opinions seem normal, because you see them all the time.
Brainwashing, essentially. And it's very hard to get yourself out of it.
