Yup, media outlets like the NYT did this to themselves really.
At some point they decided that a story could be manufactured from a few outraged individuals, even if those sources were random or completely unknown users. Bam...there's your instant moral outrage. It didn't matter that their story might be a grossly inaccurate sampling of readers or have little factual basis, the only thing that mattered was that suddenly a mob formed around them, instantly amplifying their message.
I suppose this has done wonders for those sites looking to increase ad revenue, but I wonder what the actual damage is to political discourse in this country.
Humans are bad at figuring out the popularity of hats [0].
Couple this with the nasty trick of manufacturing the popularity of certain opinions [1] and I wager that it is pretty trivial to get most people to believe in anything and especially easy to make people think fringe opinions are actually widespread and commonplace. Coupled with the emotive fallacious reasoning of "If everyone believes/says it then it must be true" and you can make reality, at least how people see it, however you like.
I am 100% convinced that this has been abused to boost the bottom line of certain media companies because outrage gets clicks and figuring out how to induce outrage means you can farm clicks by outraging people who you've conditioned to become outraged. Increasingly often media-manufactured lynchmobs are formed over topics where you can tell by talking to the outraged people that most of them are misinformed about whatever it is they are all worked up over.
It's like the world's largest (and worst) game of Telephone.
>I wager that it is pretty trivial to get most people to believe in anything and especially easy to make people think fringe opinions are actually widespread and commonplace.
I'd wager you can find plenty of examples of that on HN.
Thanks for the insightful post and especially the first link. Hadn't come across that before. I will definitely be sharing that (to my kids first of all).
At some point they decided that a story could be manufactured from a few outraged individuals, even if those sources were random or completely unknown users. Bam...there's your instant moral outrage. It didn't matter that their story might be a grossly inaccurate sampling of readers or have little factual basis, the only thing that mattered was that suddenly a mob formed around them, instantly amplifying their message.
I suppose this has done wonders for those sites looking to increase ad revenue, but I wonder what the actual damage is to political discourse in this country.