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Comment by brsg | Hacker News Reader

It's no coincidence that the following events seem to coincide

* Distrust of traditional media

* Collapse of local media

* Rise in social media platforms

Traditional media isn't competing with rival newspapers on a stand anymore. It's competing on platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. Getting clicks on these platforms is correlated with what drives engagement - usually some cultural outrage or some "out-group mocking". Newspapers are really just catching up to the psychology hacking that social media has already profited from. It's more economics than ideology that enforces this imo.

Frankly, you see this shift on HN as well. Half the time I log on here, at least 2/10 of the top articles are appeals to whatever cultural outrage triggers this site's demographics (let's be honest, this article does that too), and these articles will always have 10x the comments of other on the front page.

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Don't forget that the President of the United States called the press "the enemy of the people" [1].

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437610-trump-cal...

Trust in the media wasn't exactly that high prior to Trump.

I disagree with that president about many things, but that I agree that the press is the enemy of the people.

If he'd said that for-profit news media is the enemy of Democracy, I'd have probably bought a hat.

I guess your American? If so, please consider that you are not just one of the voices putting US at the lowest trust in the media, but currently also arguing that it would be better if America was literally at the bottom of the list.

Except he's not wrong about that. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. The press is definitely an enemy of the people.

You hit the nail on the head.

The internet has opened pandora's box of mass psychological hacking.

The only way from here is to wait and see whether we can survive like this indefinitely - maybe we'll all collectively build a resistance to media constructed to hijack our emotions. In the meantime we will each have to one by one watch our friends and relatives dive down rabbit holes of propaganda and rage. I've seen this firsthand over the past year and it's not pretty.

I wouldn't hold my breath. This stuff operates on an emotional level, not a cognitive/intellectual level. Emotions are powerful because they are largely opaque to most people most of the time and are a strong driver of behavior. Like the old saying: you can't reason a person out of a position or belief that they didn't reason themselves into. As long as this emotional manipulation is profitable (e.g., 'engagement'), I don't see a way out of this.

that line of logic falls apart when you consider that Finland: who ranks at the top, also has the internet.

USA is not the world. There are other countries that have social media as well as struggling local media yet distrust in media is not skyrocketing.

I can’t help but speculate that the extremely polarized and partisan politics of the US has some thing to do with this. I know it gets old connecting everything to Trump, but he did hold the highest office in the country for four years and during that period systematically claimed that every bit of media coverage he didn’t like was false and fake news, while also helping to spread obviously fake conspiracy theories that still seem to be popular with half the population.

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