Social media's effect on the culture

John Hawkins writes at PJ Media a post entitled Confessions of a Clickbait Guru. He has some very important things to say about the world of social media and blogging.

Social Media Is A Confirmation Bias Machine: Most people on social networks start by following people that they like, admire, and agree with. Typically, this leads to people receiving more confirmation of what they already believe. If they receive information contrary to what they believe, they will refuse to share it at best or block/mute the person that sent the information they did not agree with at worst. Over time, this tends to lead to an increasingly perfect feedback loop that confirms every bias that people had going in.

...We Don’t Share Facts Anymore: Liberals have always been able to cocoon themselves off in their own little world where they only hear from left-wing news sources. Conservatives used to not have that option because liberal sources were too ever-present. But they do now and they seem to take full advantage of it. What this means is that a hot Trump “scandal” that is everywhere in the liberal media may be laughed off on the Right as a joke, if they even hear about it at all. It worked the exact same way with Obama. The stories covered by the Left and Right are often completely different, and even if they are the same, the spin will be much different. It’s gotten to the point where the Left and Right almost live in parallel realities. Of course, that has dramatically increased the amount of tribalism you see in politics and helps lead to…

...All that being said, I hate to say it, but honesty is much less important than it used to be to the general public. For one thing, people who have an appetite for propaganda can be more interested in intentions than results. The attitude is, “Sure, the outlet might not have gotten the story right, but at least it was on the side of the angels.” Additionally, social media isn’t about credibility, it’s about feeding people what they want. The more people click on something, the more they like it and such, the more the social media algorithms reward it with traffic. So, how do you get someone to click on a story? The honest way to do it is to be very “aggressive” with your headline. By that, I mean that this headline, “Is Robert Mueller Conflicted In Trump Probe?” inspired this headline that we did, “The Fix is In: Special Counsel Robert Mueller Has MASSIVE Conflict of Interest in Trump Probe.” Which one do you think would draw more traffic on Facebook? Number 2? Ding, ding, ding, ding! We have a winner. This sort of aggressiveness has become the rule on social media. The problem is that it can very easily turn into a headline that is so aggressive that it no longer matches the story. That is not a rare occurrence on the web or in the mainstream media.

...Everyone in America seems to love the idea of bipartisan solutions to issues, but it’s hard for anyone to work together when people on both sides of the aisle bend over backward to irritate each other as much as possible on a daily basis.

Read more here.