The traditional news will never report on things that are going fine, they hyper focus on the (usually) bad exception. This incentive is to strong and perverse that they gladly misrepresent facts, dramatize them or even just make up stories.
When I discuss the day with my girlfriend, she won't tell me how the day largely went fine, the conversation is about that one colleague doing something wrong.
It's in all of us, we direct attention to deviations. Twitter exploits this to the very maximum on a scale not possible in the physical world.
The issue is not that people say outrageous things, they'll always do that. The real issue is that those views spread far and wide at breakneck speed, and thereby become popular or even culturally dominant.
Which is made possible by simple things like a retweet button and inflated follower counts. When you see somebody having 100K followers, you may think this is due to 100K people somehow searching for a person, browsing through lists of experts or having a connection with them in real life. Something you might call organic followers. That's not how it works at all. Based on engagement, after a particular threshold, it's a recommended account shown in front of many people, after that it snowballs and escalates.
And this is how you can have somebody "verified" and with 200K followers, that in real life is unemployed, has no particular useful expertise or insight, zero accomplishments, and absolutely thrive on the platform.
And it gets worse. These mid-tier influencers find each other. And if they align politically, they become an unstoppable force able to plaster the entire network with the dumbest of takes.
As this works so well, they become addicted to it. There can't be a quiet day, fresh outrage has to be constantly invented.
The traditional news will never report on things that are going fine, they hyper focus on the (usually) bad exception. This incentive is to strong and perverse that they gladly misrepresent facts, dramatize them or even just make up stories.
When I discuss the day with my girlfriend, she won't tell me how the day largely went fine, the conversation is about that one colleague doing something wrong.
It's in all of us, we direct attention to deviations. Twitter exploits this to the very maximum on a scale not possible in the physical world.
The issue is not that people say outrageous things, they'll always do that. The real issue is that those views spread far and wide at breakneck speed, and thereby become popular or even culturally dominant.
Which is made possible by simple things like a retweet button and inflated follower counts. When you see somebody having 100K followers, you may think this is due to 100K people somehow searching for a person, browsing through lists of experts or having a connection with them in real life. Something you might call organic followers. That's not how it works at all. Based on engagement, after a particular threshold, it's a recommended account shown in front of many people, after that it snowballs and escalates.
And this is how you can have somebody "verified" and with 200K followers, that in real life is unemployed, has no particular useful expertise or insight, zero accomplishments, and absolutely thrive on the platform.
And it gets worse. These mid-tier influencers find each other. And if they align politically, they become an unstoppable force able to plaster the entire network with the dumbest of takes.
As this works so well, they become addicted to it. There can't be a quiet day, fresh outrage has to be constantly invented.