Ad-driven social media platforms are willing to tolerate monumental volumes of abusive users. They’ve discovered the same thing the mainstream media did: negative emotions grip people’s attention harder than positive ones. Hate and fear drives engagement, and engagement drives ad impressions.
Marcus Hutchins, “I Was Wrong About Mastodon,”
Escaping Tech, Nov. 30, 2022
Negative, primal emotions — fear, anger — draw the most engagement. So posts that provoke those emotions rise naturally.
Tribalism — a universal human tendency — also draws heavy engagement. Posts that affirm your group identity by attacking another group tend to perform well….
To the algorithm, the content of an idea is irrelevant. Whether it’s extremist or mainstream doesn’t matter; only its ability to draw engagement counts.
Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, “How Everyday Social Media Users
Become Real-World Extremists,” New York Times, April 25, 2018.
Roland Klose 