This seems quite hyperbolic to me.

Newspapers were leveraging sensationalism and attempting to capture attention by any means long long before targeted ads were a driver of revenue.

I'd guess there are plenty of pre-newspaper examples as well.

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gdhkgdhkvff 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Interestingly, there are many laws against launching precision guided missiles, despite the fact that people were throwing snowballs at each other long before missiles were invented.

	▲	howunfortunate 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I actually think our information environment is better today than it was in say, 1930. A handful of newspapers that controlled 95% of the information was much more of a "precision guided missile", in terms of ability to control information, than social media is today. (That's not to say it's good today, it's terrifying, but at least it's possible to hear different voices, including voices on the ground)

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micromacrofoot 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

newspapers didn't follow you and your friends everywhere you went to feed all your metadata back into an addiction algorithm

people massively underestimate how insidious having millions of data points about a person is, these companies are literally modeling your behavior

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howunfortunate 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I strongly believe the worst vices of social media would all persist if there were zero advertising.

You can see that by looking at more minor or fringe social media sites. Public "liking" is literally all it takes for people to degenerate into performativeness, sensationalism, grandstanding, misinformation, etc.

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DudeOpotomus 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I find it sad that intelligent, educated people can be so blind to the evils building around them. How they confuse the opportunity for a right and how they take and accept awful as normal because they were raised without understanding what they never had...

To associate contextual advertising based on large scale demographics and location with spying, lying, cheating and thieving at an individual level, is a great example of this in real life.

In the old days, the tabloids were obvious. The sensationalism was easy to identify and passive in its voice. They sat on the end caps of grocery stores, far away from the News. TV news was regulated and there was a strict ethics code in place. Today, all news is tabloid as they all chase attention. They have all become the Weekly World News and as a result, we have clowns and ignoramuses running things.

And people fell for it. They actually fell for it...and continue to fall for it.

That is why it's a cancer. Ad tech eats everything in its path and destroys everything good in the process.

When you cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction, you have lost the plot.

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howunfortunate 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> They sat on the end caps of grocery stores, far away from the News. TV news was regulated and there was a strict ethics code in place.

This is our key point of disagreement, not any of the rest

I strongly disagree that the "Real News" of yesterday was "good information" as I define that. It served the biases of the publishers and writers. It was sensationalist. It strongly censored and suppressed politically incorrect viewpoints, to a degree not seen today. The Overton Window was miniscule. The ethics codes were largely self-serving and inert against its major flaws.

	▲	DudeOpotomus 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Is this broad generalization based on your experience, or your feelings? It seems that you may be conflating journalism with news. They are not the same thing. Curious wow old you are and where you grew up? When did you and where were you when you experienced this singular market bias.