I don't dissagree, but I think I'm using "news and opinion" more loosely. To my mind, facebook putting your sister's political rant into your feed above your uncle's fishing pictures, is a kind of wauly of profiting from devisive political opinion. Even if it is more subtle than the NYT publishing a think piece.
> the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.
It is the bot farms voicing opinions IMO. For regular people one account equals one human, and it is a difficult feeling to uproot for many people.
We're seeing the opposite, though. As the traditional media companies declined and the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.
As someone who tries to avoid the news and politics, it's pretty easy to avoid the companies selling them. But I keep running into them because there are lots of users on Hacker News/Reddit/etc. who try to interject it into every discussion they can . Invariably, these people don't come at it from the point of view that they might be wrong and the other side might be right; they act like zealous crusaders on a mission to vanquish evil.