I think our brains are wired for hyper-compacted headline news (removes all nuance), emotional bits of info (high reactionary impact), especially if it's negative (survival instinct kicks in, makes a person feels alive).

It's (much) less work to obtain this info than other options (like walking to a store and buying a newspaper, or talking to your neighbor/friend, or doing a hobby instead).

That's my very quick take. Conserving energy once benefited us greatly, and now that feature is being used against us.

I sort of agree, but what I'm worried about is that our own desire for social connection and validation has been hijacked as a commodity. As I see it, "McDonalds" capitalized on our lizard-brain's desire for easy calories, as "Porn Hub" has done for sex, "Apple" for shiny things and "Facebook" for socialization. All these successful products take advantage of some base instinct which served us well 100,000 years ago but when given the opportunity, just run wild.