I call this the "outrage economy". There are several companies (facebook, twitter, reddit, youtube, etc) that grew based on user activity of varying types. The more bickering and polarization, the bigger X Company gets and need to hire more employees and get more funding, and that feeds into more growth. There is also a secondary economy built on or used by these original companies (software tooling, ad software, legal, clickbait, etc). We now have a big chunk of the economy feeding pointless bickering.