After the 2016 election the moniker “fake news” was used to explain the break in reality that Trump’s victory represented. Just days after the election, Hillary Clinton used the term in a speech. She blamed irreputable news organizations peddling made-up stories on social media for her loss. Donald Trump quickly co-opted the phrase and he has famously used it to attack the nation’s most credible news organizations.

But what if Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both right? What if news organizations are subject to incentives that prevent us from understanding reality in the first place? What happens if reading the news actually makes you less educated and able to understand the real world?

I grew up as a news junkie. From age 12 to 20 I read the news daily. I scoured the web for the latest information so that I could puzzle together a map of reality. I was obsessed and I would read widely from both conservative and liberal news sources. I felt that it was what a responsible citizen should do to keep informed. Little did I know how counterproductive this was.

Local News

The local news is my go-to example to show bad-faith on behalf of the media. If you watch the local news, you would think the world is on fire. It’s an endless torrent of negativity with tragic scenes of car crashes, brutal murders, and horrific crimes. Watching the local news, you’d be afraid to leave your house because, who knows, there’s probably a lunatic in the shadows who will kill you. No wonder people are depressed.

When you go out into the real world you discover that it looks nothing like how it’s portrayed on TV. In fact, according to FBI statistics only 385 out of every 100,000 people experience violent crimes like murder, rape, aggravated assault, or robbery per year.

There’s a reason why journalists pat themselves on the back in small news stations and say “if it bleeds, it leads”. The local news profits from tragedy. Every school shooting gives them the opportunity to print another million dollars. School shootings provide fodder for news organizations and they spend days analyzing the killer’s manifesto, the exact play-by-play to his atrocity, and other gory details. They know that reporting on school shootings is guaranteed to create copycats, but who cares when there’s money on the line.

Hillary Clinton’s critique of “fake news” was directed toward unscrupulous people who made up facts wholesale and pushed them to unsuspecting people on Facebook. Yes, news organizations are marginally better but their goals are the same: make you angry because there’s nothing like anger or fear to get you to see another ad. They are manipulating your brain.

National News

The national news media is little better than the local news. I voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and I’m well aware of the real racial tensions that exist in this country. But what the news media created in Charlottesville might as well been shot on a Hollywood set. A few hundred idiots with tiki torches do not represent America. They are the exception, not the rule — but the news media used scenes from a small gathering of horrible racists to paint broad strokes about the entire country.

The media has inflamed tensions and exacerbated tribal divisions in this country — and they do it for the almighty dollar. Richard Spencer was a complete nobody prior to being skyrocketed to fame by all of the prominent news outlets. Somebody made the decision to give him microphone on national television and they made that decision for a reason. They allowed him to spread a hateful ideology to millions knowing that some percentage of disconnected men would resonate with it. They created Frankenstein and refused to take the blame. When will the media be accountable?

I do not blame just the left. The same thing happens in echo chambers on the right — especially on Fox News. They hand select small SJW incidences and exaggerate them to tell a broader story that’s not warranted by underlying reality just as much as anyone else. They distract everyone with counternarratives to the already distorted narratives that are circulating. Maybe we should be having different conversations in the first place.

National television news is no different than ESPN. If sports is your thing, that’s fine, but they are doing a disservice to people by pretending that they are educating them. Just listen to what Jeff Zucker, the President of CNN said: “The idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way”. He went on to say that his panelists are “characters in a drama”.

Donald Trump was elected because of the media. Don’t forget that they gave him $2 billion of free media coverage. Every analysis and counter-analysis of Trump’s nasty comments only inflated his balloon. Rather than blaming uneducated voters, maybe the media should look in the mirror and thank themselves for the present reality.

The way the media frames debates also inherently changes perception. Giving equal screen time to climate change deniers and scientists is supposedly done to be fair and balanced, but doing so also distorts people’s understanding of scientific realities and makes it seem like there is no consensus and that it’s 50/50.

Every media outlet has also become a bastion to confirmation bias and they only selectively report on stories that fit their narrative. Trump’s election has only made this worse. Look at how the media jumped on kids from Covington High School before the facts were known to the shame of all involved. Why would a small standoff involving high school kids make the national news in the first place? What does it teach us about the world that’s important? Why does Gillette’s ad that is designed to be provocative get so much attention in the news rather than something else? This is a problem that goes beyond partisan boundaries. Perhaps these are distractions to draw us in to view ads.

When was the last time you saw anything positive written about Trump in the New York Times or Washington Post? When has John Oliver provided strong counter-arguments to points that he makes in his show? On the left and the right, straw man arguments are presented and there’s little dialog between camps. It’s almost as if the curtains would fall down if a media outlet tried to build a bridge instead of tearing them down.

Let’s not forget the media’s culpability in leading us into the Iraqi war. They cheerleaded the war from day zero and pumped up the public imagination with fancy graphics of tanks and airplanes. They facilitated government propaganda with little consideration of how the war would impact innocent Iraqis or the validity of the underlying intel in the first place. When it matters most, the media lets us down in favor of sensationalism and profit.

One thing is for sure, the news is for primal storytelling — and the stories that are being chosen rarely match base realities. Even when statistics are used, they are often marred by poor study design, bias, or by simplifying the study’s conclusions so much that all nuance is removed.

My point about the media is simple: The map does not match the terrain. Our ability to understand the real world is diminished by the news in ways that were not aware of or understand. How do we know we’re having the right conversations?

Of course news organizations have to filter reality. Ever since the formation of large tribes, humans went from “unmediated man” to reliance on trusted authorities to tell us how to interpret information and what to think about in the first place. As a larger social network developed, it became impossible for individuals to know everything that was happening around them. They grew to rely on tribal and religious leaders to mediate their information. As civilization grew, this job was taken up by educational institutions and the news media as well.

There’s a tsunami of information in the world so a filter is necessary. Unfortunately, the perverse incentives of the media have given us the worst possible filter. News organizations are in an ever-present race to the bottom to get as many pageviews as possible regardless of the consequences to society. The media is exploiting brain pathways for tribal tendencies and splitting apart the fabric of society. We at least need to have a conversation about it. People need to be aware of the “man behind the curtain” that these filters represent.

With every news story we must ask ourselves who chose to focus on it and why, whether it represents the exception or the rule, and how the propagation of the story impacts society. We can’t passively accept what the news media tells us, no matter how credible of an institution it is.

The news is very much zero-sum. If we are collectively talking about one story, then there’s by definition another that maybe we should have been talking about that didn’t surface. The media’s filters make the least important stories surface. Climate change does not make good news — it’s boring, it doesn’t get pageviews. Human biology is partially to blame, but let’s not let the news media off the hook.

Elon Musk is well aware of how these filters impact real world perceptions and constrain the conversations we’re having. Last year, he suggested creating a platform called Pravda to keep the media accountable. Predictably, he was lambasted with an endless sea of negative press coverage for merely suggesting it.

“It’s super messed up that a Tesla crash resulting in a broken ankle is front page news and the ~40,000 people who died in US auto accidents alone in past year get almost no coverage” — Elon Musk

In a very real way, what the media reports is actually “fake news” even when they are talking about factual occurrences — and that’s a scary and disconcerting thought.

Social Media

Of course the media is not the only one to blame for the current state of division in this country. Social media companies deserve their share of blame too. Behind all the vapid slogans of “making the world a more open and connected place” lies a sinister truth: Facebook is running the world’s largest experiment on 2.41 billion users with zero oversight.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was not news to anyone who was paying attention. People pretended to be surprised when they found out that their “free” Facebook account was not actually free. They pretended to be flabbergasted that their info was being sold and that it could have impacted the election. Of course to Facebook this was very much a feature and not a bug, which is why they struggled to coherently respond to the situation. They responded with empty half-truths and proclaimed that they never sell your data — directly that is.

As part of Congressional investigations, it became apparent that the Russian government organized a Black Lives Matter protest in Houston. They simultaneously organized a Blue Lives Matter protest across the street and sat back and watched the chaos erupt. Everyone who went to both protests felt like they were there for noble reasons, but in reality they were there because of 3rd party manipulation from a hostile foreign power. How do we know that the conversations and thoughts that we have weren’t put there by someone with bad intentions?

What people on Capital Hill are missing about Facebook is that the whole platform is rotten from the core. Facebook’s algorithm has one goal: figure out what keeps people coming to Facebook and do more of that. The world’s smartest people are working on addicting more people to their drug. They’ve hijacked control of people’s social cortex, the most foundational part of what it means to be human. And they’ve done that for the exact same reasons the media chooses their stories: they want to show you an ad.

“Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment”

George Soros

Facebook quickly figured out the hidden truth that the media first discovered centuries ago. Outrage sells. Fear sells. Hatred sells. As a result, Facebook’s algorithm has contributed to the polarization of this country. People fight each other on the platform and separate camps have emerged. People live in their own bubbles and laugh at the stupidity of people on the other side.

Facebook has tried to introduce people to contrary information, but they quickly discovered it was ignored. Mark is aware of the problems and he has made adjustments to the algorithm to show more content from friends and family after they discovered that the algorithm may have been promoting short-term revenue growth at the expense of long-term engagement.

But in reality, Facebook’s hands are tied. They don’t have a choice, they are married to an incentive structure that forbids real changes that would benefit the well-being of their users. Facebook users are the raw materials for data harvesting by the company, not the product. Facebook’s customer is advertisers — end of story.

It’s well-documented that the longer teenagers spend on social media the more isolated and lonely they feel. Everyone posts only the good things about their lives, especially on Instagram. Spending time on social media, you’d think everyone was living a glamorous problem-free life except for you. There’s an epidemic of teen suicide and its rise corresponds exactly with social media. Mark Zuckerberg could fix the problem with a single line of code. He could reduce teen suicide by not allowing people to log into Facebook properties for more than an hour a day. But of course this is impossible to do.

The main problem with companies like Facebook is that no one knows how their algorithms are impacting society — not even the engineers themselves. No one is sure why the algorithms choose to boost one story and not another — except that some types of posts increase time on site on average while others do not.

When you post on Facebook, it’s likely that the company deliberately does not show your post to everyone at once. They slowly let your post trickle onto people’s feeds over several days so that you come back again and again to check the notifications. When notifications were first released, they were blue and blended in the background, but then a data scientist discovered that making them red would get people to check them more often. Little manipulations like this are all part of the background noise on Facebook and they are not disclosed.

In 2014 it was revealed that Facebook manipulated the news feeds of 689,003 people to either remove all positive or all negative posts and see how it impacted their moods. According to the researcher, “When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred”.

Facebook did not get informed consent from their users prior to running this experiment. All 2.41 billion Facebook users are members of the world’s largest sociological experiment. They are putting their mental health in the hands of company with questionable motives and who offers nothing beyond token transparency.

The problems with news and social media companies come down to incentives. Maybe companies like Facebook should not be allowed to make money from advertising. This would put them in a much better position to actually care about the well-being of their users.

Sean Parker, the founding President of Facebook, railed against the company: “[Facebook is] exactly the kind of thing a hacker like myself would come up with because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” He went on to say “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

It’s telling that the tech titans don’t allow their own kids to use their drugs. Steve Jobs famously did not allow his kids to use iPads. Mark Zuckerberg has created 2.41 billion digital serfs while residing behind castle walls. Zuck has famously purchased all of his neighbors’ houses for privacy while simultaneously taking everyone else’s away. The irony is palpable.

It’s not all bad news. Facebook’s algorithm could be changed to make the world a better place. It could be modified to not promote outrage. It could bring people closer together instead of tearing them apart. It could be changed to not focus on time on site. But in the absence of pressure to change this won’t happen.

There are doubtless tons of journalists who are motivated by the pursuit of the truth — and big kudos to them. Just because the incentives are bad it doesn’t mean there aren’t good people trying their best in spite of it. Journalists play an essential role in holding power accountable and I don’t want to overprescribe malice. I just think journalists and media organizations have a responsibility to ensure that their story selection helps people create an accurate mental model of reality and not muddle it.

The distortions that the filters create in our mental maps change reality. They reduce our ability to understand the world. People accept the frame that’s fed to them and agree to think about whatever the filters serve. The distortions build off each other. Every distortion has an equal and opposite reaction — which results in more chaos, more hatred, and more polarization.

Sometimes it’s worth discussing the exceptions, but the media should be careful to not imply that it’s representative of something larger than it is in reality. Repetitively mentioning exceptions automatically makes people believe that’s what the world as a whole looks like.

This is not about the left or the right. I hope that by understanding how the filters work in the background we can bring people together to transcend the tribalism that divides us. After all, we should not lose track that we share a small speck of space dust called the Earth. We’re all human and we need to learn to live together without hatred or fear. I don’t want people to disconnect either. We need people to think about how to change the incentives to bring about a better tomorrow.

It sounds like a conspiracy. This article makes it look like there are invisible people and algorithms pulling the strings and controlling people. It sounds crazy, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

The overall conclusion is that what’s in the zeitgeist is there for reasons we don’t fully understand. If you can’t find ideas in the news, Facebook, and Google, then do they really exist? How much power do these institutions have to control what is permissible or possible to think about?

The goal of this article is to open the floor to discussion about how filters are impacting our thoughts and what, if anything, should be done about it. I don’t pretend to know the answers, but I do know that this is what we need to be having a conversation about.

-Satoshi