Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outr

This is as much a problem of platform logic as it is of political economy: Reactionary outrage begets clickrates, which begets attention and reach especially when the people running these media platforms are themselves largely sympathetic to reactionary beliefs.