I think institutional media has had to shape the way it creates content to increase the likelihood its captures algorithmic engagement. They'd shaping their output for an algorithm, not people.
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Absolutely. Starting around early 2010s, legacy media began using more emotive and clickbait-style language in their headlines to remain relevant and compete with digital-first outlets and aggregators for algorithmic attention. https://bsky.app/profile/socialmedialab.ca/post/3lc3o3rbcx22t
Around that time, headline writers also began using A/B testing—because digital platforms made it possible—and increasingly wrote for algorithms rather than for human readers.
Remember articles in 2016-2017 on people in Macedonia writing stuff on US elections Trump vs Clinton for pure Ad revenues and apparently they figured that lies about Clinton and Democrats just created more revenues
A way to test user engagement on an interface. Example: Widget company’s website. Page displays either ad A or ad B. The ad agency goes with the most popular.
It’s used for a lot of other things too.
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From
'What do you THINK of...'
to
'How do you FEEL about what Joe said?'
#JOURnalism 📎
Remember articles in 2016-2017 on people in Macedonia writing stuff on US elections Trump vs Clinton for pure Ad revenues and apparently they figured that lies about Clinton and Democrats just created more revenues
It’s used for a lot of other things too.
Would argue this mechanism existed for newspaper headlines or news Trailers before. Basically everywhere where "news were sold"
But social media 10x the effect