How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by jameskilton on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @12:46PM (#14849313)

Humans are at their core emotional creatures. You don't get engagement with logic and facts. Instead you go after emotional stories. It takes immense mental effort to see through these stories and to hold back the immediate emotional responses. Many people have no clue that they are being manipulated in this way.

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Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by maxxxxx on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @03:05PM (#14850874)

I came to the US in 2000. At first I found the constant excitement in TV news interesting but after two or three years I noticed that I couldn't handle it anymore. It just wasn't comfortable for me.

Is it maybe that most people have checked out too and only a small but loud minority is addicted to all the nonsense? On Facebook it seems it's only a few people that constantly post web links or engage in flame wars. Most people I know are very quiet.

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Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by fireflash38 on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @03:34PM (#14851141)

Just because they are quiet doesn't mean they aren't impacted.

I know someone who only ever posts about gardening, and yet I know for a fact she reads almost everything people post. Her husband on the other hand is constantly posting and commenting on far-right posts. They are still influenced the same way, they just express it differently.

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Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by ShabbosGoy on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @03:48PM (#14851261)

> Most people I know are very quiet.

That's by design and intentional. Anything you say online can be used to convict you in some obscure court of public opinion where your viewpoint didn't align with the mainstream viewpoint.

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Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by javajosh on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @08:07PM (#14852888)

There is also the symmetrical problem of not reacting strongly to a story that deserves it. Plenty of people, it seemed, were quite non-reactive about the Snowden disclosures. It just wasn't an exciting news story, whether you were for or against him.

(This, I think, is the real lesson of computing in the modern era, that subjects will not object to being surveilled if they don't notice it. The abstract argument against it is predicated on possible future action, and the inability to stop it.)

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