They focus on misinformation, but I would argue that a deluge of "noise" is also pollution: the vast amounts of irrelevant, distracting content, and the popular platforms that do little to help us reduce that noise.
Let's flip that around to illustrate the systemic issue here. Earlier today, there was a front page HN submission that touched on alcoholism. It seems to me that the statement, "Alcohol is mostly pull not push. If you are consuming too much alcohol, you have the ability to control that." is not a reasonable one when applied to an alcoholic.
To be clear, the above statement regarding alcohol is reasonable for me - but then I'm not an alcoholic. Similarly, while many people are capable of regulating their "information consumption" as you suggest, it is clear that there are also many who struggle to do so.
I don't pretend to actually have a workable solution; I just wanted to try to illustrate the systemic aspect of the issue.
Alcohol is extremely difficult to avoid, for various reasons. Primarily social, but to a lesser degree in entertainment. In the same way that once upon a time the cool actors smoked (and sometimes they still do), drinking is still omnipresent in film/tv.
I'd say this supports your perspective, but mostly I just wanted to point that out. Alcohol is definitely nowhere near close to being a 'pull' sort of indulgence.
I used it to refer to physical consumption of alcohol, and by analogy spending time browsing the internet or similar. I'd quibble that the way you're using it would be more appropriately termed 'exposure', and then you could roughly equate social situations where alcohol use is prevalent to websites that expose you to a deluge of information.
This might seem like needless hair splitting, but I think it's core to the point I was trying to make. Exposure to alcohol at a social event isn't a problem for me - a non-alcoholic - because alcohol is pull (ie no one is actively coercing me to consume it). But that's irrelevant to an alcoholic, for whom exposure itself poses a problem.
Similarly, no one is forcing me to browse social media or navigate through to the next clickbait headline. But for some people, mere exposure is sufficient to cause this - they fail to successfully self-regulate their information intake.
So then to complete the chain of analogies, the article is about the power of employing such a deluge of information in a motivated manner. Depending on how nefariously this is done, we might compare it to anything from regular advertising (open and obvious), to product placement in movies (subliminal), to historical cigarette advertising prior to regulation (open, but usage is harmful to health).
I've never seen any proof of that assumption. To the contrary, all evidence I've seen from the world of marketing and PR would support the opposite.
Anecdotally, it's never been easier to shove things in peoples faces. First thanks to TV, now thanks to social media.
This may be true in principle, but the fact that advertising exists, or even can exist, refutes this in practice.
It is (well, technically - not reasonably with push notifications being abused for ad delivery), but there's a lot of push content embedded in the pull content. For instance, when I visit HN, I pull information intentionally. If I follow a HN thread to an interesting article, I again pull information. But the ads that are in that article are definitely push.
'b0rsuk already linked my longer exploration of the topic. In a lot of places in that essay, you could replace "advertising" with "propaganda" with no loss in the argument. The way I see it, the two are different only in their goals (direct economic vs. political gain) - beyond that, they're the same thing.
EDIT: I've had this suspicion not so much with articles, but with comments. In particular political discussions I couldn't help but feel that there was deluge of comments arguing in favor of a particular position that struck me as manufactured.
Meanwhile the headline stuck in my mind almost instantaneously and created an impression of the state of the current world.
So I have to take hours away from my device entirely ... but I also have to be very careful what ideas I even glance at, because they take root in my brain.
I don't think it's really the popular platforms' fault though. Simply what has happened is that the internet has dramatically lowered the cost of distributing and of consuming information. Therefore, information gets distributed and consumed that would not have been worth the cost in the past.
1. Induce people to linger longer, thereby increasing “engagement”.
2. Insert promoted content (ads) into the deluge such that they become hard to filter out.
So sharing/dissemination platforms deserve as much of the blame as any other factor.
Or to put it differently: anyone is free to create a competing platform that only hosts "high quality" content, but it seems no one has found out how to make that work on a large scale so far.
Believe it or not it's an incredibly challenging problem. Google is burned at the stake everyday for their biased response on searches when they're parsing disgusting amounts of data and attempting to minimize noise. It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't honestly, because even if you can effectively minimize returns for a given query (regardless of topic), there is then information loss to some degree and therefore arguably a bias.
I, for example, am biased against lies and towards truth.
Everyone believes that, even flat earthers and anti-vaxxers believe that.