GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy did not back down Sunday when questioned about comments he made during a campaign stop in Iowa Friday, calling Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) part of the “modern KKK.”
“I stand by what I said to provoke an open and honest discussion in this country,” Ramaswamy said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
For one simple and depressing reason - people click on it. That’s the dopamine button for modern media outlets online; those clicks are the cash register ringing.
If you want to figure out a way to elevate the discourse you have to disrupt the payment model - at the end of the day people do what gets them paid. Doubly so when the harm it causes is anonymized by operating in corporate aggregates.
No one is getting paid to post the stuff here. They’re just falling for his bull shit.
Of course not, that isn’t what I mean. I’m taking about why media in general reports as “straight news” the inflammatory blathering of political figures. Whether you as the reader agree with it or not, these kind of statements in headlines get the publisher clicks.
Clicks == revenue for for the media site, so they are incentivized to provide more content like that. Politicians need exposure more than just about anything, so they tend more towards that kind of language in part to get greater exposure through those venues.
I don’t think people posting content like this to aggregators like lemmy are in that incentivizing loop directly, but users engaging with the content even if they hate does incentivize the behavior further(albeit in a very small, incremental way).
Underrated comment. Can’t upvote more.