I forget who I heard it from, but some bigger YouTuber mentioned that when talking to someone at YouTube about "the algorithm" and the person who worked at YouTube suggested rather than always thinking about it being the algorithm that drives what's popular, that it's the users who engage with that content. In the "line goes up" capitalist mindset, the algorithms at these companies are really just designed around engagement, and keeping people hooked. The "algorithm" is just what it thinks the audience wants.

And while I think a lot of us would like to think better of ourselves, I think we all have a strong tendency to engage with ragebait, and "shocking" content. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad trait in a pre-internet world. But in the world where the shareholders always need the line to go up infinitely, all of our media gets filled with the garbage that makes the line go up the most.

In the short term, we can all try more to engage less with the kind of content, showing the algorithms that we don't actually want that content.

In the long term, we should probably de-couple our media from the infinite-growth investor-first capitalism that has formerly-respected publications writing articles about what 5 random people said on Twitter that they can ragebait people into engaging with.

Yes but…I try ink media literacy is something that isn’t necessarily intuitive. It can and should be taught in elementary and secondary schools.

That's true but unregulated internet access at a young age exists

Engineering controls are always the most effective way to limit contact with harmful substances.

True, but imagine if we gave everyone an automatic weapon and told people they need to be responsible for what they choose to shoot. True, but we probably shouldn't have given out so many weapons.

It's a terrible metaphor, but there's an intersection between personal, collective, corporate, and technological responsibility that we need to consider, and it's hard to articulate in a few sentences. IMHO we're all in an ouroboros of thought and action, internally and externally.

Not necessarily. If it only applies to sites with algorithmic feeds (i.e. specifically ones that serve individualized streams to each user based on what they specifically have liked in the past), companies who choose to be in control of what content they show are held to account and smaller platforms are safe.