This is one of the core problems with social media in particular, and to lesser extent it’s about the internet, and ultimately communication in general. It’s almost a law of information physics, like entropy.
The food source of media is attention. And in a crowd of sources clamoring for attention, the winners are those who shout the loudest and have the most attractive message.
It’s about the economics of attention. My eyes were opened to this by a 1997 book Data Smog, by David Shenk, in the early milliseconds of the public internet’s big bang. (The book could have been condensed to a chapter, but hey, authors get paid by the word.)
What the internet does is reduce rate limits and increase scale of reach. And social media exemplify tne monetization of attention almost purely. It’s literally all they sell.
