Political news used to be packaged alongside everything else: sports, entertainment, etc. If you watched TV or read a newspaper, it was hard to avoid. Then something interesting happened…

A new era of choice meant that you could take a deep dive into your favorite topics and ignore everything else. This divided the media landscape into the interested and the uninterested.

As the competition for people’s attention spans intensified, the internet got better at understanding what we like and giving us more of it.

Being interested in politics essentially means taking sides, as the ideological differences between parties are so great that they’re often defined as polar opposites (left vs. right).

So if you were interested in politics, you started seeing online content with the same underlying message: “This is why your side is right.”

Outrage, it turns out, attracts lots of clicks – and virality is the name of the game when it comes to news media.

Social media platforms allow us to curate a public-facing image: an avatar of what we believe in and stand for.

Since sharing something online is like making a statement about what group we belong to (and don’t belong to), there’s little appetite for timid stories. Attention-grabbing stuff is what wins out.

As a result, the internet’s “economy of attention” began to reproduce basic social dynamics online: it’s easier to make a new friend when you’re united against a common enemy.

But there’s also a glaring downside to this: the more connected we are to an identity or group, the harder it is to reconsider our position. We start shutting out the possibility of being wrong.