Re:‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
by TeMPOraL on Monday October 26, 2020 @03:17PM
(#24900074)
Don't forget about Evelyn, who makes money by exposing people to ads, and Steve, who provides a platform to do it and gets paid by Evelyn. Together, they create the primary pressure that forces stories to be attractive to the likes of Alice and Bob, and they'll more than happily enable Mallet, as long as his poison has a side effect of getting more Alices and Bobs to view stories filled with ads.
That's the problem here. Kill the advertising dependency, and Mallet will find it much harder to spread their poison.
Alice wants to read the news, Bob wants to write it. Mallet wants to foster discussion of an idea of dubious worthiness to further nefarious but unstated aims.
Alice is attracted to lurid, weird and scary, even though she mostly knows better, because we all are.
Bob is attracted to easy stories, because it is hard to run a paper today.
Mallet doesn't care too much about how his poison gets out there, only that it does.
Among other things, this suggests that any one thing, like not embedding Twitter quotes, is unlikely to make much difference - Mallet will shift to something else.