Yeah. It's even simpler than that. I saw a similar post on HN a few months ago theorizing that Facebook's machine learning algorithms could very plausibly pick up that controversy generates activity, and promote controversial topics more and more to the point of optimizing for divisiveness and extremism.

And most people here are slowly realizing that it's not just a theory... it's likely already happening. We're on the early years of acknowledging that it's happening. 5-10 years from now, some article will come out about how Facebook has been manipulating our world view for decades and people will link back to these posts and say "Duh, we've known about this for ages".

Hey, to the people who work at Facebook, Twitter, Google et al, it's your responsibility to make sure this stuff isn't happening. The company you work for has no path to fix these problems on its own, this stuff needs human supervision and intervention, and hyperawareness of what kind of damage is caused by manipulating people en masse.