Just because you have one goal (in this case traffic) doesn't mean your actions dont have other effects.
Generate clickbait that, for example, leverages the distrust the public has in a group, or is based on the desire to see someone/some group get their comeuppance, or the desire to hear tales about how your group is being exploited, etc, and you start manipulating public opinion about those things.
Fox News, for example, started conservative but far less radical...I dont know if they were radicalized by the success of their own success by this sort of manipulation, but it is certainly an option.
Once you have success at manipulation, even if that wasn't actually your intent, a financial incentive appears to MAKE it your intention.
> Fox News, for example, started conservative but far less radical.
Fox News was created to be a GOP propaganda vehicle [0]. They've gotten more radical as the GOP has because that's why Fox News exists. There are interesting questions around whether the tail is wagging the dog, but I think the simplest, most accurate perspective is to treat Fox and the Republican Party as a single unit whose goal is always to maximize GOP power.
I think intent is pretty important to the concept of "manipulation": you don't often hear the sun being accused of manipulating the weather, despite the overwhelming influence it has over it.
Surely, to cause people to be angry and misinformed is bad whether it's part of the end goal or just for money through clicks.
I'd say it was worse a couple of years ago, though. It's as if there were a generation of young men and women in journalism who had grown up on Something Awful and 4chan, and whose main marketable skill were farming negative attention online. The craze for hiring that sort as "social media managers" have died off a little.
That's because manipulate implies active control, which the sun doesn't have. As a different example, you can manipulate the levers of a machine and, if you are not skilled or paying attention, get a result you did not plan for.
an intent was there, but not the intent to create what became the eventual outcome. Buzzfeed has an intent - to create clicks. What GP was saying was that this creates an unintended effect, that of political and social manipulation, which unfortunately ends up as an incentivized loop for Buzzfeed.
It is absolutely true that views far from my own aren't automatically radical.
But the overdramatic "they are coming for YOU" rhetoric, (just as an example, I recall a lead into a discussion of food stamps that showed a fist punching through a map of the U.S.), the messianic treatment of Trump, the extreme yet hypocritical positions, these all lead me to conclude they've shifted to not just "from from me", but into radical.
I try to get news from multiple sources to reality-check my own biases, and I've regularly seen Fox report "facts" that no one else is, while avoiding big news that they don't like. I've seen them parrot lines from Breitbart and other sources that are widely considered unreliable and extreme. I've seen plenty of respectable conservative news outlets distance themselves from Fox News reporting more than once.
(There are studies that show that Fox viewers are less informed on issues than average, but those studies haven't done a good job on determining causation, and less informed does not equal radical, so I'm not basing my opinion on those.)
Isn't getting clicks manipulating people into clicking?
We might want to say it is categorically different than manipulating people in other ways such as getting them to buy certain products or vote certain ways, but if we go down that path then I think we can begin saying that about most forms of manipulating people and thus we would need to spend a bit more time working on a standard of how acceptable different forms of manipulation are.
There is also a question of how do you draw the line between manipulating someone, tricking someone, educating someone, and convincing someone. If scientists are trying to warn the public about the dangers of climate change are they trying to manipulate public opinion, educate the public, or convince the public?
> If scientists are trying to warn the public about the dangers of climate change are they trying to manipulate public opinion, educate the public, or convince the public?
Depending on the person, the methods used, and the level of integrity maintained, some combination of all three.
If you suppress legitimate criticism and intentionally distort facts, you are engaging in trickery.
If you correct misinformation and do your best to present an accurate representation of your understanding, you are educating.
Generally, scientists tend to do a pretty good job of focusing on education, but the dynamics of the discussion around the information they share tends to cloud that distinction.
The problem is that many groups have decided that trickery is more convincing than education and that should make compromising ethics and integrity mandatory. (While other groups seem to have had no integrity to start with.) As a result, the discussion of the distinction between education and trickery and accusations of trickery often drown out the actual attempts at education.
We might have a problem because scientists spend too much time just giving the information and not on working on the 'manipulation' side of it. For example, take any news site dedicated to scientific news and look at how much even they will twist the facts to make it easier to digest and more interesting.
Scientist: Chemical XYZ seen to reduce growth rate of cancer ABC cultured in a petri dish compared to control group. Around 10% reduction average, p < .01, see table 4. Not statistically significantly better than chemical MNO which was also being tested. Further research needed.
Science News: Chemical XYZ helps fight cancer ABC.
Normal News: Does <something that contains chemical XYZ> cure cancer?
If scientists were better at manipulating education to be engaging to the public they wouldn't lose out as often to those pushing fake (or at least far more questionable) information.
> If you correct misinformation and do your best to present an accurate representation of your understanding, you are educating.
That is, if you treat the other side as a person and not as an ignorant ape. Three are very well known renowned scientists in my country that despite being right on all fronts (in that specific case, vaccinations) they harm themselves spectacularly by being complete pricks and treating critics (no matter how feeble the arguments against vaccines are) as sub-humans.
I had the opportunity to participate in a course about scientific communication a couple of years ago. A key point that was told us then is that you have people on the other side, not blank slates needed to be written. In other words, when communicating science, the best you can do is to present all facts, correct misinformation and what not, but leave the final decision to who is listening. You give them all the elements for a proper judgment, but you leave the judgment to whoever you are speaking to.
Perhaps people won't be convinced. Perhaps they'll believe you only partially. But IME you get far more interest from them (I've participated in a "meet the scientist" event once, answering questions from the general public) like that.
Climate-change alarmists refuse to acknowledge that any criticism could possibly be legitimate. Every questioning of the narrative, even just a bit, is dismissed -- funded by Big Oil/Koch/right-wingers, not a "real" scientist, too stupid to understand why "adjustments" were necessary, "the science is settled!" -- etc. In many cases, editors insist critical articles be completely deleted/removed, rather than available to even be seen or discussed.
Example -- recent (2 days ago) post offers an alternative interpretation of respected climate scientists' own published data. Flagged almost immediately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961462
Disagree? Please point to criticism of climate science widely deemed to be "legitimate."
This criticism has become the 'mortal sin' of modern science, in a similar way to criticisms of evolutionary theory. If a theory has no criticisms, it means no one is really thinking hard about it.
If your goal is just to monetize your website (via ads or perhaps sponsored content), manipulation doesn't really seem like it's in your wheelhouse. I suppose it's not utterly implausible that a political party or other major player could attempt to pay off an outlet's owners to use them for manipulation, but that seems a lot more expensive than just astroturfing on twitter and facebook.
One notable counter-example to my POV though would be that the Koch family has a tendency to hand big chunks of money to think-tanks, websites and universities for promoting their agenda. Not really sure what the best take-away from that is, though.
Was Buzzfeed trying to manipulate people or just get clicks?