Facebook’s algorithm change has spurred an angry, Fox News-dominated News Feed

Only 15%? I'd guess it's way, way more. Like 90%.

News today is primarily headline-driven. You don't have to sit down and watch the evening newscast anymore, you can just scroll through Facebook and see headlines and comments, which almost always drop context and nuance in a way that's engineered to make people upset.

In a way, it's probably the most irresponsible aspect of journalism today. The media's ethical priorities are incredibly outdated: if a writer makes a mistake twelve paragraphs into a fifteen paragraph article, it's a major problem requiring a correction. But if an editor appends a headline that actively misleads 100x as many people, no one has any problem with it.

The news, in this way, probably misinforms as much as it informs. This is why you get the wildly divergent realities on the right and the left. There's simply no professional awareness of the unbelievably damaging power of headlines that--from a consequentialist perspective--are frequently abject lies.

BTW, I think it is not unreasonable to expect that different models of funding or engagement are differently represented on the left and right sides of politics. Contrary to certain views, the left and the right are not two equal, symmetric, graceful wings of a bird, keeping society in balance: they're two different worldviews and sets of fears and priorities. It's not inherently surprising that one would find their business more profitable with a smaller pool of paying customers, and the other finds more profit in a larger pool of casual visitors to whom to show ads, or that one finds more funding from the rich, or that one's worldview requires deeper and more nuanced storytelling than the other to support its conclusions.

You reacted, however trivially, so you'll now get more of it. You'll get more of it even if you reshare with a comment along the lines of "this is complete rubbish".

So the more outrageous rises to the top.

Facebook doesn’t sell catheters and old people scooters, so I would guess that their audiences are more diverse.

The Washington Post recently tightened up their paywall, too.

If you want some more on the list for balance there are plenty of left wing Breitbarts you could add. Those are free too.

BTW I think fear porn / anger porn is an appropriate term. It releases brain chemicals that can be addictive just like sex porn. This explains some of its virality.

* Wall Street Journal: Subscription needed

* Bloomberg: See this article for $1

* Fox News: Completely free

* Breitbart: Completely free"

But BBC, Huffpo, CNN, NBC/MSNBC et. al. are free, and they actually dominate the list, i.e. those entities and a few others add up to something considerably bigger than Fox. Or Fox + the Mail + Breitbart, for the most part.

I think the headline was unnecessarily biased to the extent it doesn't paint the picture we see presented in the actual data, which is actually interesting and not quite so black and white.

Facebook is only useful for its yellow pages function. Unfortunately that alone is enough to keep my social circle on Facebook. It’s just really hard to break away, because social circles consists of people with different social circles, and not everyone is going to replace Facebook with the samething, and then everyone is still on Facebook.

Maybe e-mail could be the core of the next generation yellow pages? It’s the only thing everyone has.

Only really big topics make it through like the New Zealand shooting.

Have you tried curating your feed by unfollowing pages, groups, people who share things you don’t like?

Unfortunately I think we've forged a new road to politics, we can call it "outrage marketing". The more the opposition is outraged, the more publicity you get - the more extreme candidates from both sides bubble up in popularity.

Chemists designed a chemical that’s optimized for engagement too — it’s called heroin!

On the other side, one could argue that just about any successful product or service, by definition, optimized for engagement (addiction). Hit TV shows, beautiful vacation spots, sex. So where do you draw the line?

What these platforms need is transparency and a web of trust pretty much the same as distributed version control systems. Look at Linux and how the source is managed, it would be a good model for social media in combination with blockchain for engagement.

If you want to make optimizing for engagement illegal—a plan I support, tbh—you need to eliminate capitalism either from the inside or the outside. From the inside, you can try to win hearts and minds of customers and employees with endeavors that aren't structured for profit, e.g., public-benefit corporations or perhaps hybrid non-profit models (like Mozilla, or like OpenAI's new thing, which I am cautiously optimistic about, or like Etsy before they gave up their B-corp status to save the business, which is part of the caution in my optimism). If you can hire all the best employees away from the Facebooks and Netflixes of the world to the Mozillas and Etsys of the world (which, given the number of software engineers who are incredibly frustrated about spending their days micro-optimizing ad engagement, doesn't actually seem that hard), you can probably out-compete them. Or, from the outside, you can just make for-profit companies past a certain point of profit straight-up illegal (which is to say, make the government cease to recognize corporate structures beyond certain limits - this isn't additional government intervention, this is just the removal of government protections for corporations like the corporate veil, work-for-hire, "right-to-work," tax advantages, etc.).

But to answer your question within your own worldview, it's both.

Also, they tend to use a lot more inflammatory language and wound-inflicting statements than those in the middle or near-middle.

That's why we should refrain from being either group.

Dividing the world into two "sides" isn't good for us.

I don't think the world of political discourse is really divided into two "sides" as you imply, despite that being useful for media that make money from making people angry.