Ultimately to maximize engagement you want to get people obsessed with something. Whether it’s sometimes violent racism, vaccine paranoia, national politics, whatever, you just need to get them obsessed, and then they will spend hours every day on your site feeding this beast and go insane. Then you will sell lots of ads and get rich.
In this case, the government was saying: “Hey we have no problem in general with you driving people insane, but in this particular topic, having a bunch of antivax lunatics ain’t helping with the pandemic.”
IMO the problem is not the content per se, it’s the massive psychological manipulation. It’s incompatible with a free, functioning democracy.
> Ultimately to maximize engagement you want to get people obsessed with something. Whether it’s sometimes violent racism, vaccine paranoia, national politics, whatever, you just need to get them obsessed, and then they will spend hours every day on your site feeding this beast and go insane. Then you will sell lots of ads and get rich.
Yes. This is exactly what Elon is doing with X at the moment.
In this case, the government was saying: “Hey we have no problem in general with you driving people insane, but in this particular topic, having a bunch of antivax lunatics ain’t helping with the pandemic.”
IMO the problem is not the content per se, it’s the massive psychological manipulation. It’s incompatible with a free, functioning democracy.