Frequently Asked Questions
What is the attention economy?
The attention economy is the system in which human attention is treated as a scarce resource and monetized through advertising. Platforms compete to capture and hold focus, so business models reward whatever content keeps people scrolling, typically outrage, novelty, and emotional intensity rather than accuracy or depth.
How do you talk to people you disagree with?
Effective conversations across disagreement start from the goal of preserving the relationship, not winning the argument. Lower certainty, avoid judgment, choose timing and setting carefully, and accept that minds rarely change in the moment. They change later, when people feel respected rather than defeated.
Read the full answer: How to Talk to People You Disagree With
Why is social media so divisive?
Social media is divisive because engagement-based algorithms reward whatever content holds attention longest, and emotionally charged content reliably wins that competition. A 2018 MIT study found false news was about 70% more likely to be retweeted than true news, and reached people roughly six times faster. The divisiveness is a structural outcome of the business model, not a side effect.
What is the liar's dividend?
The liar's dividend is the strategic benefit that flows to dishonest actors when the existence of convincing AI-generated content makes genuine evidence dismissible as fake. Coined by legal scholars Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron in 2019, it describes a second-order harm of synthetic media that often outweighs the harm of any individual fake.
How do you become media literate without becoming paranoid?
Useful media literacy starts with incentives, not claims. The first question to ask of a piece of content is not "is this true?" but "how is this designed to make me feel, and why?" Understanding what business model produced something is more protective than fact-checking it claim by claim.
What is political polarization?
Political polarization is the process by which political opinions and identities cluster toward opposing poles, leaving fewer people in the middle. Researchers separate ideological polarization, meaning distance between policy positions, from affective polarization, meaning hostility toward the other side. In the United States, the second has grown faster than the first.
What is affective polarization?
Affective polarization is hostility toward members of the opposing political party rather than distance on policy positions. It is measured through feeling thermometers, trust questions, and willingness to live near, work with, or marry across party lines. In the United States it has grown faster than ideological disagreement over the same period.
What causes political polarization?
Political polarization has structural causes rather than moral ones. Media deregulation removed friction that once rewarded restraint, cable and digital economics made audience capture more profitable than broad appeal, and algorithmic curation optimized for engagement. Together these changes made emotionally intense partisan content the most rewarded form of political communication.
How much do Americans trust the media?
Gallup's long-running survey shows public trust in U.S. mass media falling from roughly 68% in 1972 to 28% in 2025, measured as the share with a great deal or fair amount of confidence in reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The decline tracks the shift from broadcast scarcity to digital abundance.
What are examples of political polarization?
Examples of political polarization include partisans reporting they would be unhappy if a child married across party lines, majorities describing the other party as more immoral than other Americans, residential and social sorting by party, and two audiences receiving incompatible factual accounts of the same news event.